Just to get this Zoomtard thing rolling again, lets hear Karl Barth on what it means to be a man:
Real man lives with God as His covenant-partner. For God has created him to participate in the history in which God is at work with him and he with God; to be His partner in this common history of the covenant. He created him as His covenant-partner. Thus real man does not live a godless life – without God. A godless explanation of man, which overlooks the fact that he belongs to God, is from the very outset one which cannot explain real man, man himself. Indeed, it cannot even speak of him. It gropes past him into the void. It grasps only the sin in which he breaks the covenant with God and denies and obscures his true reality. Nor can it really explain or speak of his sin. For to do so it would obviously have to see him first in the light of the fact that he belongs to God, in his determination by the God who created him, and in the grace against which he sins. Real man does not act godlessly, but in the history of the covenant in which he is God’s partner by God’s election and calling. He thanks God for His grace by knowing Him as God, by obeying Him, by calling on Him as God, by enjoying freedom from Him and to Him. He is responsible before God, i.e., He gives to the Word of God the corresponding answer. That this is the case, that the man determined by God for life with God is real man, is decided by the existence of the man Jesus. Apart from anything else, this is the standard of what his reality is and what it is not. It reveals originally and definitively why God has created man. The man Jesus is man for God. As the Son of God He is this in a unique way. But as He is for God, the reality of each and every other man is decided. God has created man for Himself. And so real man is for God and not the reverse. He is the covenant-partner of God. He is determined by God for life with God. This is the distinctive feature of his being in the cosmos. – Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2 (ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance; trans. Harold Knight, et al.; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 203.
Your Correspondent, Thinking about Sabbath
What does Barth mean by “a godless explanation of man”?
Presumably an explanatory description of man that doesn’t make any reference to God?
I wonder are we still technically men when we go to heaven? ie would Barth say the same of a “biology-less” description of man?
But wait, what am I saying? Aren’t we physically resurrected? But then is heaven itself physical? sorry, I’m probably getting off track here now.
For fear of leaving only vaguely relevant comments I will risk adding too many in a row in the hope of becoming relevant:
I think Barth is absolutely correct here. He doesn’t deny that there are Godless explanations of man, and doesn’t say they are inconsistent with physical reality. In a way I can only physically explain physical attributes of man. A true spiritual explanation would in theory could only be communicated spiritually, ie explained to our spirits and not our brains, but then Barth says that we give an answer to God’s Word. An aspect of this description is the implication that the physical responds to the spiritual.
When I pray, I become more than myself; even though I am praying physically I do sense the spiritual world. It is as though what is happening physically starts to reflect what happens spiritually, and I become whole. If it is all happening physically then it must also be possible to explain it physically, yet the physical explanation does not do justice to everything that is happening.
The only physical link between the physical and the spiritual here is that the same thing is happening in both worlds. That is how we can physically describe what is happening spiritually. But when I worship, ideally I am responding to God first, myself second. God is spiritual and I am physical, and though the physical answers to the spiritual, it is still physical, and we can still find a physical explanation.
Speaking personally, when I deny that physical part of myself that acknowledges God, I become less of what I know to be true man.
It’s the “explanation of man cannot explain man” that confused me. If Barth means a godless explanation of man’s purpose than I can agree. But if he means a godless explanation of what man is then I’ll predictably disagree. Though we’d probably quickly hit am impasse because we probably have very different ideas of what spiritual means (I believe the spiritual is physical).
I think he means that man is determined by God and that the actual instantiation of a real man (Jesus) was a man who lived fully what it meant to be determined by God.
Thus, a godless explanation of man will fall short very obviously in that it can’t comprehend the Real Man of Jesus. But following on from that, a godless explanation of what it means to be a man is bound to be missing that which binds it to reality.