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Barth on Human Wickedness


This post was published on Sunday 9 December 2007.

This was originally published as a comment on another blog (edit: which has since been closed down) by Hueston Finlay on 13 May 2006. The author asked: ‘And what is the difference between the wickedness exhibited in the actions that led to that young man’s death, and the wickedness of ordinary folk muddling their way through life?’

Karl Barth’s answer to your question,

‘If wickenedness belongs to human nature, how would it possible for the incarnation to take place?’

is basically that we are not truly human - Jesus is. We are corrupted, so that what we do does not flow directly from what we are. We are liars, appearing to be something we are not. Obviously there is a lot more to it than that, but this isn’t the time (or space..!), and I’m not the person.

This is one of his reasons for starting his anthropology with Christology - looking at Jesus (rather than ourselves) for his definition of ‘human’. We can know ourselves more truly through Jesus, whose nature is revealed in the Bible and through the Holy Spirit, than through looking at ourselves. Our actions are symptoms of our corruption, they do not show us what it is to be human.

That does side-step rather neatly the problem of Jesus being ‘just like us’, when we are fallen and corrupted.

Thus ‘evil’ within us is not a characteristic, but something deeper than that, twisting and corrupting our very being. It cannot be trained out of us, and it is common to us all.

Hueston’s final question is the tricky one! In human terms of course, we would say there is a huge difference between beating someone to death and lying to your boss. The ‘sound’ answer is to say that sin is sin is sin - any black mark on something white spoils it. There are effectively two states of being - holy (God) and sinful (us).

While that last statement is undoubtedly true, it’s difficult to accept the previous one. A couple of little black marks are hardly noticeable - a great splodge of ink is surely much worse. Surely lying to your boss is nowhere near as bad as murder.

On one level, that is correct. Our society recognises that in the criminal justice system. There are set fines and jail sentences for difference crimes, increasing with the severity and circumstances of the crime, and so on.

But on another level, it isn’t. We come back to Barth’s idea that we are basically liars. We do not behave as we should, we do not act like true humans, because we are corrupted. Any lie is a lie, no matter how big or small. Any act which is not in line with our humanity is a lie, it de-humanises us (quite literally for Barth - when we sin we give up our humanity and become something else).

The bar is high, and we’ll fail to jump it every time we try, because of our corrupted nature. We can’t win! But that’s where Jesus comes in - as the only true human that has ever lived, he sealed that achievement on the cross when he died. Through his achievement, on his return all those who belong to him will be transformed to be like him: fully and truly human, incapable of sin and free from the power of death.

God has promised to forgive all who turn back to him in repentance - whoever they are, whatever they’ve done. God’s forgiveness is open to those people who beat that poor boy to death, hard as that may be for us to accept, in the same way as it is there for the rest of us.