Abstract
The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology
Gerald McKenny
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 310 + xiv pp. $120.00
This is an immensely important and impressive study. Gerald McKenny, professor of moral theology at the University of Notre Dame, undertakes nothing less than a comprehensive analysis of Barth’s ethical thinking from the Romans period to the final volumes of the Church Dogmatics. While questions concerning the development of Barth’s moral theology across the various stages of his career are examined, the focus of the work in fact lies elsewhere. What drives the argument of the book is, rather, a sequence of detailed and closely argued investigations into the questions and themes that fundamentally preoccupy Barth’s ethical thought. McKenny explicates these with great care and insight, taking his readers into the intricate logic of the primary texts and engaging throughout with the most important critical literature.
Basic to Barth’s work in moral theology is his unshakable commitment to a radical Protestant doctrine of divine grace, and McKenny demonstrates how much of what is most interesting, important, and controverted in Barth’s work—his provocative association of the problem of ethics with the problem of sin, his near identification of dogmatics and ethics, his account of the living divine command as the sole source of ethical direction, his rejection of moral axioms and casuisty, and his account of conscience—takes shape as a result of his sustained labour of grappling with the sovereignty and concreteness of divine grace as the central problem of theological ethics. Across the book’s central chapters, McKenny expounds and assesses Barth’s attempts to do moral theology in a manner that honours the permanent priority and sovereignty of God as author and judge of all things, and thus as the One who decides and establishes the good amidst creaturely life. These chapters are an education, not only in the substance and form of Barth’s theology, but also in the central questions and problems which orient theological ethics generally. The argument of the second chapter is a case in point, where McKenny’s nuanced discussion of Barth’s account of modernity and assessment of the essentially “modern” character of some of the crucial elements of the Swiss theologian’s ethics, illumine not only specific issues in Barth interpretation but also much wider debates as well.
It is a great virtue of McKenny’s study to examine those aspects of Barth’s theological ethics typically adjudged most problematic—the status of human agency, the nature of moral knowledge, the matter of moral education, formation and instruction, and the character and methods of ethical decision-making—and to offer interpretations whose primary aim is to inhabit Barth’s thinking and to display, with outmost sympathy, its commitments, aims, and manoeuvres. His work in this regard is, I think, exemplary. McKenny is thus able to show how many standard criticisms are in fact far too sweeping, mistaken, and even careless in their handling of Barth’s work. But precisely because he provides such a generous reading, McKenny’s own criticisms of the gaps, imbalances, and limitations in Barth’s work, when they come, are all the more weighty, serious, and deserving of careful consideration: one thinks, in this regard for example, of McKenny’s compelling assessment of how superficial and indiscriminate Barth’s treatment of the historic traditions of Christian moral theology can sometimes be.
McKenny’s fine book represents a high-water mark in the ongoing interpretation and reception of Barth’s theological ethics in the service of contemporary moral theology.