Karl Barth: An Unlikely Conversation Partner for Valentine’s Day
About the author: Elizabeth Gatewood is pursuing her PhD in theological ethics and systematic theology at the University of Aberdeen. She is working within Karl Barth’s theology to articulate a Protestant theology of the household. She is also a classically trained violinist. She and her family recently moved from Aberdeen to Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
This week in the United States and some places abroad, the world is aflush with chalky candy hearts bearing sentimental—and sometimes obtuse—romantic greetings. Children’s backpacks are weighed down with treasures destined for the trash can—cardboard Valentines, plastic toys manufactured for momentary pleasure, and enough sugar to keep dentists in business. (Last year, my sister’s dog ingested a Valentine’s plastic dinosaur, requiring a four-figure Valentine’s surgery.)
With all due appreciation for the value of cultural celebrations and rituals, you may surmise that the American celebration of Valentine’s Day is about as pleasing to me as one of those chalky hearts. It is not entirely clear what American Valentine’s Day celebrates—friendship? Romantic love? Sexual encounters? Sentiment? “The marketing of candy?” adds the mother of small children with a hint of desperation.
Karl Barth is an unlikely conversation partner for a theological conversation about romantic love. We can be sure that a holiday celebrating romantic love and sexual encounters would not have been his style. Barth had these unsparing words to say:
“[Sexual] experiences arising from self-absorbed, self-enslaved sexuality, even at maximum intensity, are only deceptive experiences of the moment, ending in sterility and depression, in open or hidden feelings of shame, and this not on ethical grounds but because of the metaphysical distortion of nature.”1 A page later, he continues: “it is erroneous to suppose that human nature is frustrated if in the time of physical sexual maturity it cannot be sexually active, but it must await a suitable opportunity for this activity. Nobody has yet been made ill or destroyed through sexual discipline.”2 This is not exactly material for a Hallmark card or candy heart.
Furthermore, there is Barth’s infamous love trio, the subject of much speculation, judgment, and fascination.3 I bring you this little commented-upon detail, one that caused me great consternation when I reconstructed the timeline and considered things from Nelly’s perspective.4
In 1921, the Barth family moved from Safenwil, Switzerland to Göttingen, Germany. During those years, Barth worked intensely to catch up for his lack of formal training in Reformed theology. In 1924, Nelly had a stay in a sanitorium. When she and Barth reunited in August of 1924, they probably conceived their fifth and final child. Hans-Jakob was born in the spring of 1925. A few months later, in July of 1925, Barth spent time with Charlotte von Kirschbaum at the Pestalozzis’ chalet. Nelly had moved countries with small children in tow, endured health challenges significant enough to merit a sanitorium stay, and brought a fifth child into the world. Just months later, while Nelly was still in the thick of postpartum vulnerability, Barth was miles away from his own house full of children and an infant, enjoying an adult mountain getaway fizzing with ideas and attraction. (Ask any postpartum mother if you need any clarification on why this bit is disturbing.)
Knowledge of Barth’s biography makes many of the passages in Church Dogmatics III.4 cringe-worthy. A compassionate reader, as I tend to be, can also detect (beneath possible hypocrisy) the sadness and complexity of a man who could not live up to all that he wrote.
And yet, for all of his failures and rhetoric against the family and sex for its own sake, Barth kept marriage as a central exemplification of the I-Thou relationship in his theological anthropology.5 Furthermore, Barth’s view of marriage is one in which sexual love can flourish and exist for its own sake, apart from procreation or tamping down lust.6 Marriage is so stubbornly central that it has merited numerous critiques and reconstructions, each trying to show how we can hold on to Barth’s theological anthropology without accepting what are regarded as the troublesome bits about gender and marriage.7
For these and other reasons, Barth is an unlikely candidate for theological reflection on love. And yet, I pause to consider how one of Barth’s treatments of love might challenge us this week. (And before we continue, do go and collect all of those plastic objects and discard them before your dog gets them…)
In Church Dogmatics IV.1, Barth defines love, along with faith and hope, as an aspect of the being of people reconciled to God in Jesus Christ.8 Barth does not frame these three as virtues as we might imagine them but rather as responses to the work of the Holy Spirit. Specifically, faith responds to God’s verdict and corresponds with justification. Love responds to God’s direction and corresponds with sanctification. Hope responds to God’s promise, corresponding with salvation and calling. Working against these responses are the human sins of pride (faith), sloth (love), and falsehood (hope).9
Barth’s emphasis on activity, history, and event means that the saving action of Jesus Christ is always concrete and historical, never abstract, timeless, or ethereal. Similarly, our human response to being elected and reconciled in Jesus Christ is real human action. In the case of our “love,” which corresponds to God’s gracious direction, our love will always be concrete. We recall that Barth’s ethics is built upon the conviction that God’s command is the true measure of what is ethical and will come in concrete particularity to each person in each ethical situation.10 God’s direction, Barth writes, is about helping us make use of our freedom.11
Our love, then, will be contextual and specific. It will get messy with the stuff of human life. “Love” is not, for Barth, a feeling we have about God or one another. In correspondence and gladness, human action responds to God’s “yes” to humanity. Our ability to love other humans well (the horizontal component of love between people) derives from our having been loved (directed, claimed, saved, elected) by God.12 This resonates nicely with the seldom discussed “mutual aid” component of the I-Thou relationship.13 Fellow-humanity is not only defined by mutual seeing and hearing but also by action.
Certainly, this “love” is not primarily or paradigmatically romantic; rather, romantic love is a type of this more general conception of love. Our romantic love, then, is not an abstract feeling stoked by sexual encounters and projects of self-creation. Instead, it is for those married, bedded down in the household, enmeshed with the quotidian objects and tasks of the home. If we heed it, God’s concrete and specific command will supply the direction that will produce the action that is human love.
If we follow along the threads and themes of Barth’s writing on love in IV.1, we know that this love will never be salvific or justifying. Human love can be freed from its messianic projects—whether solving an issue of injustice, treating another person as a project or mission field, or looking to human love for self-definition and self-fulfillment. Salvation has already been achieved; we are free to respond.
Valentine’s Day often seems like an invitation to measure ourselves (and our love) against a giant mirror of cultural expectations. What if it was instead an invitation to hear how God might direct us toward particular action that will constitute and strengthen our love?
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4: The Doctrine of Creation, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. G.W. Bromiley et al. (T&T Clark, 2010), 137.
Barth, CD III/4, 138.
See, for the definitive treatment, Suzanne Selinger, Charlotte von Kirschbaum and Karl Barth: A Study in Biography and the History of Theology (Penn State University Press, 1998).
In the following paragraph, I rely on Stephen Plant, “When Karl Met Lollo: The Origins and Consequences of Karl Barth’s Relationship with Charlotte von Kirschbaum,” Scottish Journal of Theology 72, no. 2 (May 2019): 127–145.
See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2: The Doctrine of Creation, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. G.W. Bromiley et al. (T&T Clark, 2010).
For example, Barth, CD III/4, 146, 188, 267–268.
For a recent comprehensive critique that chronicles these debates through time, see Faye Bodley-Dangelo, Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (T&T Clark, 2021).
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. G.W. Bromiley et al. (T&T Clark, 2010), 92–122.
Barth, CD IV/1, 79.
See Karl Barth, CD II/2: The Doctrine of Election, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. G.W. Bromiley et. al. (T&T Clark, 2010) and CD III/4.
Barth, CD IV/1, 100.
Barth, CD IV/1, 105–7.
Barth, CD III/2, 161 ff.
This was a wonderful discussion. It is fascinating connecting one’s personnel life to the life of their writing. I appreciated the point about love moving us to action, not only corporate action, but also action within a relationship. Thank you!