The Universality—and Concrete Particularity—of Barth’s Account of Honor
An Essay by Elizabeth Gatewood
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.
I had intended my previous post about the senselessness of defending our honor to be a standalone piece. It came from reflecting on a significant life experience in which I chose not to defend my honor, though I had every right to. That decision has borne great fruit in subsequent years, such that when I read Barth’s account of honor, I immediately resonated with it.1
Yet Barth’s discussion of honor has kept nudging into my mental space. What is this honor that we are not supposed to defend? Is it different than worldly honor? What does it feel like to have, or not have, worldly honor? How do we theologically parse the asymmetries of honor? Furthermore, the results of the US presidential election have spurred commentators, themselves mostly members of the intellectual elite, to muse about how working-class people have been largely denied cultural honor and recognition, not to mention feasible roads for a sustainable life. I am on a “career break” to use the proper terminology, having paused my dissertation research and writing to care for my children as my spouse begins a new job. I find myself occupied with tasks that receive scant cultural honor, even as the sum of them produces something of an honored “package” insofar as it fashions my family into an instantiation of a middle-class, American, Christian ideal. Yet if having a reasonably put-together family life earns one some worldly honor, the myriad mundane tasks that constitute such an endeavor certainly do not: endless loads of laundry, setting up dentist appointments, keeping up with the calendar of holiday activities and obligations, quizzing a second grader on spelling, picking up dirty socks, etc. The list of invisible domestic tasks continues infinitely.
To put it bluntly, being a stay-at-home parent is not an honored position in society, even if it is increasingly privileged. So Barth’s discussion has a certain grip on my heart and imagination because of the noble vision he presents, wherein each person is bestowed an immutable honor by God.
For Barth, God gives honor to each person, concretely and specifically. It is not a general status or quality. It is not a bland and toothless designation that God has loved each creature, that everyone has dignity in the eyes of God—a designation that, because of its universality and lack of specification, amounts to saying practically nothing at all. In Barth’s words:
It cannot, then, be a characteristic which might be borne by the human race collectively. It is not a general and equal determination of all human creatures as such. If the term is not to be empty, it must mean the honour of the concrete and therefore always the individual man, the dignity and estimation due to every man, but due to each as this particular man, not merely as a specimen of the race, but directly, personally and exclusively.2
Instead, each person receives God-given honor that enables, equips, and permits her to live in her fully-contextual, fully-bodied, fully-particular life. And by “live,” Barth does not mean some kind of status, either. He is referring to the action that constitutes a being-in-action, the human action that some see eviscerated by Barth’s theology but others insist is established, not annihilated, by his setup.3 In other words, a person’s honor is the concrete specificity of her action in her life, with all of its limits and contours.
This vision is quite challenging to think about, partly because it sustains a (perhaps intentional) blurring between God-given and worldly honor. For Barth, there is only one type of honor, even if the God-given honor of some goes unrecognized, unappreciated, or misunderstood.4 “External honor,” Barth writes, is about the “recognition” of each person’s God-given honor. God’s honor isn’t an ethereal status, floating a few feet above the circumstances of each life. For Barth, a person’s honor is confirmed as it is “revealed and made tangible by the honour which comes to man through the command of God, through his being placed in service.”5 Each person’s honor is revealed in their becoming “a witness to God in the limitation of his existence.”6 God’s honor for me, right now, wears a housewife’s apron. That is real honor, even as my friend’s real honor is to run a large corporation.
One problem or complexity, it seems to me, is that our Christian grammar often assumes that worldly honor proves or reveals God-given honor. (Think for a moment about how famous pastors are introduced on book jackets and at speaking engagements.) And our Christian grammar stutters over how to express the God-given honor of those who do not have worldly honor. (For an important counter-example that might confirm this observation, consider the work of theologians like Brian Brock and John Swinton on disability.) Baked into our very patterns of speech and behavior are biases that lead us, individually and collectively, to the “blindness” of misunderstanding or overlooking the honor of some.7
Perhaps this is partly because we often confuse competence and professional success for honor. And the mistake here is that “honor” starts to function for us like a free-floating concept that hovers above the concrete particularities of life instead of one that is fully shaped by them. When it does, those who receive worldly honor will inevitably be the ones with beautifully put-together lives and accomplishment-dense resumes. When the particular, contextual, specific character of honor is forgotten, it will no longer be possible to imagine (with Barth) the honor of the laborer or grocery deliverer or customer service representative.
The thrust of his exploration is that we should attest to and confirm the God-given honor of each person because each person’s life is under the particular, concrete “Yes,” and “You may live!” of God. It is provocative in part because having or lacking honor does not fall neatly along the familiar lines of identitarian politics or categories of privilege.
The question, it seems, for those of us who have some measure of worldly honor, is how to affirm and witness each person's particular God-given honor. Not in a sentimental or patronizing way, overcompensating by cheerfully propagating a convenient fiction. “Essential workers” in the pandemic quickly lost the applause and appreciation of the masses, many receiving only cheap, empty accolades while continuing to do dangerous work. You will never find me in a t-shirt or affinity group proclaiming motherhood as the “highest calling.” That slogan, while plainly theologically false, is also a pious lie that gives a patronizing pat on the head to mothers while they continue to toil at culturally invisible work. Such affirmation of and witness to each person’s honor will likely involve increased measures of interpersonal kindness and structural justice.
A child crawls into my lap, one who was up sick in the night. What I will accomplish this week is sending off this blog post, packing Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes, furnishing the correct costume and props for the school project, hosting a holiday party for a group of boisterous five-year-olds, feeding people who will quickly become hungry again, and maybe vacuuming the floor.
Barth would say that I am participating in my God-given honor in doing those things. The question is: can I rest securely in the knowledge that that honor is enough?
“Jesus Christ is God’s mighty command to open our eyes and to realise that this place [the kingdom of God] is all around us, that we are already in this kingdom, that we have no alternative but to adjust ourselves to it, that we have our being and continuance here and nowhere else. In Him we are already there, we already belong to it.”8
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), 647–685.
Barth, CD III.4, 655.
See, for example, Paul Nimmo, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (T&T Clark, 2007).
Barth, CD III.4, 659.
Barth, CD III.4, 658.
Barth, CD III.4, 661.
Barth, CD III.5, 659.
Barth, CD IV.1, 99.
Thank you, Elizabeth. I have learned something similar from themes of our identity and significance being in Christ, not in our performance or credentials. But you are showing a deeper angle here, tied to such an important calling of being a parent.
Fantastic. This is perspective shifting, your work is important. Keep going. Thank you for changing the mind of this husband and aspiring father.