Embodied Ethics: A Conversation with Karl Barth and M. Shawn Copeland
An Essay by Catherine Tobey
About the author: Rev. Catherine Tobey is a current PhD student in theological ethics at the University of Aberdeen. Drawing on Karl Barth’s theology, her research centers children as the dynamic, interpretive key to the Church’s understanding and enactment of the Kingdom of God. Catherine is a graduate of Whitworth University and Princeton Theological Seminary, and is a Minister of Word & Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Years ago, a friend told me about her amazing pastor. Intrigued, as I was myself a pastor, I wondered how she had come to this conclusion. It turns out she was repeating what her pastor had said about himself from the pulpit.
One Sunday, he explained that, as a pastor, he was called to spend each week tucked away in his office, reading the Bible and listening for God to speak to him. Then, he could write a sermon to interpret this insight for the congregation. And, man, was he good at it.
Since folks do not like hearing disparaging comments about their church, I had to choose my words wisely. How, I asked, could he effectively speak to the congregation if he did not know them? How could he instruct them to be neighbors in a community he did not spend time in?
Perplexed, she insisted that God must provide this knowledge when she spoke to the pastor in his office each week. How convenient!
Unfortunately, this tendency to tuck ourselves away from the world is alive and well among Christians of all forms, even (pause for shock value) academic theologians. Isn’t it weird, though, how comfortable we can be with the gap between theory and practice? Perhaps this is especially true in theological ethics, my discipline.
Frankly, I am curious about what merit an ethical theory or theological idea can have if there is no lived touchpoint. This might be a surprising question, but I will risk it: What, if any, is the benefit of ideas from ivory towers? How can those tucked away from the world have anything meaningful to say about the embodied, everyday struggles of those in nearby neighborhoods and across the globe?
Barth is not ignorant of this concern. As the editors set the stage for Church Dogmatics III/4, they explain,
The sanctifying claim of God does not meet [humans] in a vacuum. It meets [them] in the whole world of creaturely activity in which life is set. Ethics arises where the vertical claim of God encounters [humans] in [their] horizontal relationships, i.e., in the concrete situations of life, nature and history, in the continuities of daily life and work.1
In the volume that follows, Barth explains what this looks like. Readers may enjoy his discussion of The Holy Day, Confession, and Prayer, then skip ahead to contemplate Vocation and Honour. As if on a personal quest for sanctification, we may find ourselves overlooking the heart of the volume (at best, stopping only to see what Barth has to say about “Man and Woman”). However, in this middle section, Barth describes living in a community, loving our neighbors (near and distant), respecting and protecting life, and standing on the side of the poor.
Our avoidance of this content is, perhaps, understandable. Even Barth notes, “There can be no doubt that active as distinct from contemplative or meditative brotherly love is the most difficult form of Christian service.”2 This does not, however, let us off the hook. The very fact of our existence remains: “the individual with [their] actions is not an atom in empty space, but a [human] among [their] fellows, not left to [themselves]…nor in a position to leave others to themselves.”3
Barth goes on to envision a world where, as one “holds his near neighbours with the one hand, he reaches out to the distant with the other.”4 Though “we must begin where we are,”5 Barth calls us to ever-widen our circle, which explicitly includes learning new languages6 and embracing immigrants and refugees.7
Herein, Barth also notes, “everyone should treat [their] existence and that of every other human being with respect” on the basis that “it belongs to God.”8 He even affirms Luther’s statement that God “always wills that everyone should be protected, liberated and secured in face of all outrage and violence…that no one may cause [them] physical harm or suffering.”9
Suggesting the call to “radically transform the general living conditions of all [humans],” Barth explicitly names the importance of everyone’s health, wages, working hours, housing, standards of living, and more.10 These cannot be individual achievements, but rather, we must stand on “the side of the minority, the humiliated and oppressed.”11
This is not an isolated sentiment, but evident in other volumes of Church Dogmatics; indeed, Barth describes the command of God as “self-evidently and in all circumstances a call for counter-movements on behalf of humanity and against its denial in any form, and therefore a call for the championing of the weak against every kind of encroachment on the part of the strong.”12 It is also worth checking out Against the Stream, in which Barth insists that Christians ought “always to be found in the company of the hungry, the homeless, the naked, the sick, the prisoners.”13 He even says “those who are rich must cleave to [the poor], if they would be close to [God].”14
For Barth, these commitments are not an optional “add-on” to the Christian life but inherent to an effective witness to the Kingdom of God. Speaking to this, in a 2016 lecture, Catholic Womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland takes up the “recent anti-black assaults, shootings, and murders.”15 Offering a pertinent critique, she explains:
That these murderous events have happened, that we do not understand why they have happened, and with such frequency, reveals the failure of Christianity to teach us authentic self-restraint and consideration of others, the failure to teach us to cultivate and reinforce social solidarity, to guide us in evaluation and purification of our cultural and social values, and to offer us an authentic moral vision of life.16
She insists: “above all Christianity has failed to teach us the lesson that consumed the mind and heart and lives of the Johannine writer and that writer’s beloved community: the lesson of love.”17 According to Copeland, “What is at stake in these horrific happenings is love.”18 She asks two very serious questions: “Have we followers of Jesus preferred respectability to love, silence to protest, passivity to active hope? Have we forgotten about love?”19
For Copeland, "The language of love ties together the fourth Gospel and the three letters that bear the authorial name of John. The love these texts advocate is neither sentimental nor cliché. This love constitutes practical, a very practical, condition of discipleship. Indeed, verbal confession of who Jesus is can be authenticated only through practical love.”20
Jesus' example calls us "to be a dynamic sign of prophetic audacity, truth speaking, and zeal for the reign of the God of Jesus. Just as Jesus was for others through practical love — miracles, healing, and consolation — so too disciples of Jesus, in their time and circumstance, are to be for others in practical love, consolation, and practical commitment.”21
Wondering aloud, “What might it mean to speak of compassion and solidarity in the concrete?”22 Copeland goes on to explain, “Active engagement in solidarity is predicated on embodying ethics, that is, the hourly, creative, intentional, responsible, choosing, acting, and living for the good and true, for the well-being of all creation.”23 Copeland notes, “At the same time solidarity entails informed critical awareness and understanding of human persons, the conditions under which they live and whether those conditions contribute to and further human flourishing or not.”24
In case there is any confusion as to what this means, she clearly states, “Solidarity calls us to take sides with children, women, and men who have been made poor, marginalized, and despised, to offer to them the same openness, hospitality, and compassionate care that Jesus of Nazareth offered to those whom he encountered in his time and circumstances.”25
Despite the gap between when Barth wrote and when Copeland spoke, we see a prevailing truth: As Christians, we are unmistakably called to an embodied ethic of love. This means we cannot just tuck ourselves away in a study, no matter how great our resulting sermon or theological contribution might be. We cannot write off efforts in social justice, whether they are advocating for trans kids or against the genocide in Palestine, as leftist endeavors are irrelevant to our faith.
The life-giving love of God, the liberating command of God, is unavoidable. The Kingdom of God is at hand, and we must ask ourselves whether we welcome it or resist it. Whether you welcome the insights of modern Womanist theologians like M. Shawn Copeland or stick with dead white guys like Karl Barth, Jesus’ example of solidarity with the oppressed remains the same. The alternative, I suppose, is a sort of self-isolation that results in preaching about how great you are. And that should scare you stiff … well, actually, it should be a kick in the butt to get up and out into the real world to which you are called.
Geoffrey William Bromiley and Thomas Forsyth Torrance, “Editors’ Preface,” in Church Dogmatics III/4 (T&T Clark, 1961), 1. They go on, noting, “Special ethics is the exposition of this encounter, and in relation to creation Barth develops it in the four areas of freedom for God, freedom in association with fellow-men, freedom for life and freedom in limitation, which correspond to the four aspects of man discussed in the doctrine of man in C.D., III, 2” (Bromiley and Torrance, “Editors’ Preface,” 1–2).
Barth, CD III/4, 503–4.
Barth, CD III/4, 12.
Barth, CD III/4, 301.
Barth, CD III/4, 292.
Barth writes, “Our own language must not be allowed to become a prison for ourselves and a stronghold against others…In the case of each individual there will always be many foreigners with whom no communication is possible. The basic thing to be remembered is that the relationship between one's own and foreign languages can only be one which involves a centripetal motion. In it we are always on the way from one point to another. We thus see already that the concept of one's own people is not a fixed but a fluid concept. As we affirm and love our own people in our own tongue, we shall not be too hasty, for all our presumed knowledge, to say definitively who belong to this people and who do not. Indeed, we shall not try to do so” (Barth, CD III/4, 294).
Barth explains, “And if we encounter foreigners in our own land and among our own people, we must measure them as we do natives by the question whether we can be at one with them in obedience to the divine command. For the rest, our only impulse will be so to strengthen the inner forces of our own land and people that we can not only tolerate many foreign countries, and many foreigners who find a second home among us, but make them our own, and be no less fruitful outwardly than in our own life” (Barth, CD III/4, 297, emphasis added).
Barth, CD III/4, 343.
Barth, CD III/4, 347.
Barth, CD III/4, 366.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 (T&T Clark, 1957), 719.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 (T&T Clark, 1960), 547.
Karl Barth, Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings 1946–52 (SCM Press, 1954), 246.
Barth, Against the Stream, 246. It is often worth quoting Barth at length, and this is no exception. He explains, “First, there is no place in the Bible where the rights of the rich are proclaimed, where God appears as the Lord and Savior of the rich and of their wealth, where the poor are exhorted to preserve the wealth of the rich and remain poor themselves merely for the sake of the rich. There are, however, many places in the Bible where the rights of the poor are proclaimed, where God declares Himself to be the upholder and avenger of these rights, where the rich are commanded not to forget the rights of the poor, not to alter or ignore them just when they feel inclined to do so, but rather to be rich only for the sake of the poor and for their benefit. Secondly, there is no place in the Bible where anything in the nature of praise is accorded with riches, where the rich are upheld and exalted. There are, however, many places where the poor are extolled as blessed, where they are called the chosen of God, where the words ‘the poor’ are synonymous with ‘the righteous’” (Barth, Against the Stream, 244). He goes on to state definitively, “the Bible is on the side of the poor, the impecunious and the destitute. He whom the Bible calls God is on the side of the poor” (Barth, Against the Stream, 244–245). Barth concludes, “Christ was born in poverty in the stable in Bethlehem, and He died in extreme poverty, nailed naked to the Cross. He is, then, the companion, not of the rich men of this world, but of the poor of this world” (Barth, Against the Stream, 246).
M. Shawn Copeland, Discipleship in a Time of Impasse, Mary Milligan, R.S.H.M. Lecture in Spirituality, Loyola Marymount University, April 13, 2016, https://bellarmine.lmu.edu/theologicalstudies/initiatives/milligan/2016mshawncopelandphd/2016video/.
Copeland, Discipleship.
Copeland, Discipleship.
Copeland, Discipleship.
Copeland, Discipleship.
Copeland, Discipleship.
Copeland, Discipleship.
In this lecture, Copeland defines these terms elegantly, noting, “Compassion may be understood as a mode of relation in power critically conscious of and challenged by the oppression and suffering of others. Compassion acts in self-giving love and offers intimate and generative care for others. Solidarity is the empathetic incarnation of Christian love and this love springs from the free and personal decision of compassion and love and commitment to others” (Copeland, Discipleship).
Copeland, Discipleship.
Copeland, Discipleship.
Copeland, Discipleship.