Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies: Karl Barth as Resolution to Sexual and Body/Soul Dualism

I presume sin impacts humans not only in the experience of alienation but in conceiving all things in an alienated manner. That is, the failure of humanity becomes the singular truth, the only kind of humanity we know, and it is presumed there is no alternative to antagonism and dualism. Soul/body, male/female, or heaven and earth are taken to be, not only the historical understanding, but the singular reality. In psychoanalysis this shows itself in Lacanian psychoanalysis in that the antagonism structuring the Subject is presumed to be a necessity. Alienation and antagonism produce the Subject without possibility of qualification. One might manipulate this antagonism (death drive), but best of all, perhaps through therapy, one will be resolved to living with it. The insight of psychoanalysis, is that the various historical dualisms, centered on soul and body or male and female (but including every aspect of what it means to be human including life and death, language and meaning, heaven and earth) arise from a singular structure within the human psyche.  

Psychoanalysis locates the antagonism within the individual in interpenetrating categories such as ego and superego, but most dualisms have as their goal the presumed capacity to rid oneself of the negative, as is illustrated with male/female. Male is associated with the soulish, the rational, or the spiritual, while female is equated with the body, the natural, and the passions. As the church father Jerome describes it, “As long as woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as body is from soul. But if she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and will be called man.”[1] Every human must strive for the masculine and the Christ-like and aim to shed the fleshly-feminine, but clearly the female sex starts with a disadvantage. As Ambrose writes: “She who does not believe is a woman and should be designated by the name of her bodily sex, whereas she who believes progresses to complete manhood, to the measure of the adulthood of Christ. She then does without wordly name, gender of body, youthful seductiveness, and garrulousness of old age.”[2] What is at play, in even Christian texts, is the notion that the masculine is abstract, spiritual, soulish, and universal, and the feminine is bound by the body. As Daniel Boyarin lays out the opposed pairs, man is to woman as substance is to accident, form to matter, univocity to division and difference, soul to body, meaning to language, signified to signifier, natural to artificial, and essential to ornamental.[3]

The psychoanalytic insight is to assign what Boyarin and others have concluded is universal to the human sickness. The details and historical permutations of the sickness may vary (Neo-Platonism, Adam and Eve, Judaism, or Christianity, have been blamed) but what Lacanian psychoanalysis attempts is a diagnosis of the human disease which explains how humans are traumatized by death. Death resistance as castration, the Oedipus complex, the focus on human sexuality, the entry and orientation within law and language, may or may not be right in the details, but what it incorporates within its explanation is the shape of male/female or soul/body antagonism and how this constitutes the human Subject and her world. What it does not do is provide any path beyond the problem.

Karl Barth provides a different (simpler?) approach to assessing both the universal human disease and its resolution, in that Christ serves as definition of what it means to be human. Barth does not start with the phenomena of the human as it may present itself to the anthropologist or the psychologist, as this will only lead to one going astray, “especially as they always arouse at this point the burning interest which powerful inner contradictions always bring to light.”[4] What Barth might be referring to specifically is not clear, but he has hit upon the truth of the development of modern psychoanalysis in its focus on contradiction (life versus death, male versus female, body versus soul, or the imaginary against the symbolic) as the primary focus of study and interest. The turn to Jesus Christ as model is simultaneously a turn from the supposed normativity of this antagonism.

Barth is also departing from traditional Christian dogma, which begins with man’s existence in the abstract and then applies this understanding to Christ. As he points out, this has resulted in a “certain one-sidedness,” referring perhaps, to the sort of reflection found in Ambrose and Jerome. The downgrading and oppression of women and the privileging of the soul, represents a majority position in the history of the church. Barth, by making Christ definitive of what it means to be human, is setting theology on a different foundation than the “older dogmatics.” The body/soul, male/female, and mind/body dualism can now be approached and potentially resolved in Jesus Christ. At a minimum, Barth provides a largely untapped point of departure.

The ontological determination of humanity is grounded in the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus. So long as we select any other starting point for our study, we shall reach only the phenomena of the human. We are condemned to abstractions so long as our attention is riveted as it were on other men, or rather on man in general, as if we could learn about real man from a study of man in general, and in abstraction from the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus. In this case we miss the one Archimedean point given us beyond humanity, and therefore the one possibility of discovering the ontological determination of man. Theological anthropology has no choice in this matter. It is not yet or no longer theological anthropology if it tries to pose and answer the question of the true being of man from any other angle.[5]

Barth derives his concept of what it means to be human from the singular man, Jesus Christ. In his volume on the doctrine of creation, Christ is the “Archimedean point” for understanding not only humanity but all of creation. Barth, through a more circuitous route, lands close to the Maximian formula, “creation is incarnation.” Or, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[6] Barth’s doctrine of creation, like his doctrine of anthropology, presumes creation by itself is a mere abstraction. The incarnate Christ provides the concrete center and revelation concerning creation: “Because man, living under heaven and on earth, is the creature whose relation to God is revealed to us in the Word of God, he is the central object of the theological doctrine of creation.” Which leads to Barth’s anthropological focus: “As the man Jesus is Himself the revealing Word of God, He is the source of our knowledge of the nature of man as created by God.”[7] Anthropology is not a subset of the study of creation but is its center, and true anthropology is approached only through the truly human one. “As the man Jesus is Himself the revealing Word of God, He is the source of our knowledge of the nature of man as created by God.”[8] Barth concludes: “But this point of departure means nothing more nor less than the founding of anthropology on Christology.”[9]

Barth builds upon this foundation (in section 46) with his opening thesis in which he sets forth the primary terms of body, soul, and Spirit: “Through the Spirit of God, man is the subject, form and life of a substantial organism, the soul of his body – wholly and simultaneously both, in ineffaceable difference, inseparable unity, and indestructible order.”[10] Humans are both body and soul – simultaneously and inseparably. “Man’s being exists, and is therefore soul; and it exists in a certain form, and is therefore body.”[11] In Christ these are not constituent parts. “He is one whole man, embodied soul and besouled body: the one in the other and never merely beside it; the one never without the other but only with it, and in it present, active and significant; the one with all its attributes always to be taken as seriously as the other.”[12]

The death and resurrection of Christ do not alter this order: “The whole man, soul and body, He rises as he died, and sits at the right hand of God and will come again.”[13] This soul and body wholeness is an eternal fact about who he is. “He does not fulfil His office and His work from His miraculous annunciation to His fulfilment in such a way that we can separate His outer from His inner or His inner from His outer.”[14] Everything is simultaneously inner, invisible, and spiritual, and outer, visible, and bodily.

Barth illustrates the point through a series of biblical verses which refer alternatively to Christ “giving himself” (Gal. 1:4), giving his soul (Matt. 20:28), or giving his body (Luke 22:19). “Jesus, He Himself, is His soul, and His body, and it is the one whole man who died on the cross and thus made our sin inoperative and completed our reconciliation.”[15] In turn it is the whole man, body and soul, that is raised. Body and soul are not parallels or two parts or two lines. Their union in him permits no choice but to consider them together. “They cannot be considered independently. In and with one another they are the oneness and wholeness of this life.”[16] Which is not to deny that there is a higher and a lower or a dominating and dominated, but Jesus is both. Barth does not mention a male and female principle, but inasmuch as these might represent the body and soul, or the sensuous and the rational, it can only be said that Jesus is both. “His life of soul and body is really His life. He has full authority over it.”[17]

It is important that Christ accomplished this in his flesh. Flesh may be a neutral term referring to human existence, but it also has an evil connotation. “It indicates the condition of man in contradiction, in disorder and in consequent sickness, man after Adam’s fall, the man who lives a fleeting life in the neighbourhood of death and corruption.”[18] Christ has come in the flesh to condemn sin in sinful flesh (Rom. 8:3). He suffered in the flesh (I Pet. 4:1). He reconciled us “in the body of his flesh” (Col. 1:22). He “abolished in his flesh the enmity” (Eph. 2:15). In his flesh he parted the veil in the Temple and provided entry into God’s presence (Heb. 10:20). Even in his resurrection body he is still in the flesh, and is not pure spirit (Luke 24:39). He provides true food and true drink continually through his flesh (Jn. 6:51). Flesh, which in itself speaks of death, disorder and disobedience, through his flesh takes on life, order and obedience. “The flesh, which in itself profits nothing, becomes a purposeful instrument. The flesh, which in itself is lost, attains a determination and a hope. The flesh, which in itself is illogical and irrational, becomes logical and rational. As the Logos becomes flesh and Jesus is flesh, it is shown that this man has and is spirit and life, and the flesh itself becomes quickening and living and meaningful.”[19]

Barth equates the work of Christ in the flesh with creation itself – with the ordering of chaos into a cosmos. The reconciliation, ordering, rationalizing, of Christ in the flesh “is the triumph of the meaning of the human existence of Jesus.”[20] Chaos in itself offers no explanation no rationale, nor order, but through the ordering of the flesh in Christ the world and humankind are an ordered creation and cosmos. This establishes a new basis for understanding humanity, creation, and the human relationship to God.

The Christian response to dualism is to recognize that most every form of human subjectivity is built upon an antagonistic dualism (between body and soul, between male and female, between the ego and the law, or between life and death) but there is one human to whom this does not apply; namely Jesus Christ. Jesus is the alternative to alienation, antagonism, and dualism and this alternative applies to all and grounds a holistic Christian understanding.


[1][1] Jerome, Commentary on the Letter to the Ephesians, Patrologia cursus completus, series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1841–66), 26:533; translation from Vern Bullough, “Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women,” Viator 4 (1973): 499. Cited in Daniel Boyarin, “On the History of the Early Phallus,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 8.

[2] Ambrose, “Exposition of the Gospel of Luke,” in PL 15:1844. Boyarin, Ibid.

[3] Boyarin, 12-13.

[4] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation III.2 (Hendrickson Publishers, 1956) 325. All quotes are from III.2 unless otherwise indicated.

[5] Barth, 132.

[6] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1; Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.22.

[7] Barth, 3.

[8] Barth, 41.

[9] Barth, 44.

[10] Barth, 325.

[11] Barth, 325. 

[13] Barth, 327.

[14] Barth, 327.

[15] Barth, 328.

[16] Barth, 331.

[17] Barth, 332.

[18] Barth, 335.

[19] Barth, 336.

[20] Barth, 336

Christ as Definitive of Torah and Judaism – Not Their Dissolution

There is a time and space bending aspect to the gospel which is no mere metaphor. The time, space, and place Jesus occupies, according to the writers of the New Testament, is the beginning of all things (John 1:1), the place of Israel, and the Temple and, as Jesus says, before Abraham he is (John 8:58). This present tense presence of Jesus in the ancient past is an interpretive key deployed throughout the New Testament. The 7th day of rest is, according to the writer of Hebrews, an ongoing reality encompassing all of human history (Heb. 4:6). Paul identifies Christ with the rock in the wilderness of Sin: “They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ” (I Cor. 10-2-4). Matthew identifies Christ with Israel, “And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Matt. 2:15). Jesus, in the middle of history, is the beginning, the door to the seventh day, the one present now before Abraham. The early church fathers will continue to identify Christ directly with Adam, Moses, and Joshua, so that Jesus is the subject of the Hebrew Scriptures. Our tendency may be to dismiss this as allegory or metaphor, and in doing so we may cling to a flat consecutive ordering of time and history, and thus miss how it is that the events surrounding Christ fold back to the alpha and forward to the omega of all of history (Rev. 1:8; 21:6; 22:13).

Maximus formula captures the time and space bending nature of the incarnation: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[1] As Maximus explains it: “This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings.”[2]

It is of doctrinal significance that the division which develops between Judaism and Christianity is gradual, in that Christianity was originally understood to occupy the same time and space, share the same scriptures, and even accord Torah the same primacy, such that Christians met in synagogues and were probably considered a sect of Jews. Magnus Zetterholm argues that the name, “Christian,” arises in Antioch because there may have been up to twenty to thirty synagogues in the city, and the designation may have come from the Christians or from their fellow Jews as a way of distinguishing their particular synagogue. As Zetterholm writes, “That Christianity eventually became a non-Jewish, separate religion does not mean that this separation must already have taken place by the first time we hear the term ‘Christian.’ The sources actually indicate the opposite.”[3]

But even to describe “Jews” in this fashion may already be anachronistic, if “Jew” is thought to specify a particular religion. Daniel Boyarin raises the question whether Jewish or Christian are categories which existed during the Second Temple period. The Greek term Ἰουδαῖος (Ioudaios) simply means Judean or Jew, and meant something like the ways of the Judeans/Jews as a people. To imagine Jewish designates a religion with a singular and agreed upon essence is anachronistic and mistaken at several levels.

The same sort of development is seen in more recent history with terms like Hinduism (a British designation), which simply refers to the practices of the people on the subcontinent of India and until the British designated the category, did not exist as a singular religion or even a particular set of practices. The same thing is true in Japan. The religion known as Shintoism is a late development (of the Meiji Restoration) imposing the notion that the animistic practices of the various clans fit under a singular umbrella unified by State Shinto. The Meiji government debated whether to designate Shinto a religion or a national identity, and created laws that reflect contradictory conclusions at different points. The central government eventually sent out State Shinto missionaries to enforce unified practices on the variety of animistic “religions” practiced on the Islands of Japan.

 So too “Judaism” is an open-ended term, according to Boyarin, “talking about the complex of rituals and other practices, beliefs and values, history and political loyalties that constituted allegiance to the People of Israel, not a religion called Judaism.”[4] In turn, “Most (if not all) of the ideas and practices of the Jesus movement of the first century and the beginning of the second century—and even later—can be safely understood as part of the ideas and practices that we understand to be ‘Judaism.’”[5] But Judaism, is not a closed set of ideas or a unified understanding, as Jews were broken into ever dividing factions, arguing over what constituted the essence of their religion.

Gregory Knight maintains, “The Pharisees were a kind of reform movement within the Jewish people that was centered on Jerusalem and Judaea. The Pharisees sought to convert other Jews to their way of thinking about God and Torah, a way of thinking that incorporated seeming changes in the written Torah’s practices that were mandated by what the Pharisees called ‘the tradition of the Elders.’” Knight refines the usual understanding of Pharisees and Sadducees: “Traditionally, scholars have portrayed the Sadducees as strict interpretationalists who accepted nothing as binding except the literal language of the Torah. At the other extreme, the Pharisees have been portrayed as the more progressive sect which accepted the whole corpus of traditional law-the ‘Oral Torah’-that had developed around the written Torah.”[6] Knight notes that this is a generalization that will not hold in that “the Sadducees were not completely averse to the traditional law nor were the Pharisees always the more lenient, tradition-bound group.”[7] Sorting out this difference though, will not begin to settle the issue of what is essential to being Jewish. As Boyarin writes, “It is quite plausible, therefore, that other Jews, such as the Galilean Jesus, would reject angrily such ideas as an affront to the Torah and as sacrilege.”[8] The Zealots would, in turn, reject all forms of Judaism but their own.

The Apostle Paul describes Judaism as lacking an essence in the understanding of the Jews. He describes it, in Hegelian fashion, in that the mystery of the Jews is a mystery to the Jews. The essence of Judaism escapes Jews (2 Cor. 3:15).  “But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away” (2 Cor. 3:14). Christ, in Matthew, describes a hollow emptiness (that of a tomb) in the Judaism of the scribes and Pharisees: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness” (Matt. 23:27). Where Christ is the “filling up” or fulness of the law (pleroma), the scribes and Pharisees are “full” (ἀνοµία) of emptiness. Their problem is not legalism but an active negation of the law. Jesus has no problem with law but with its emptying out, which is the mystery around which their Judaism revolves. Their focus on the letter takes the law as its own end but leaves out the doing: “The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses; therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them” (Matt. 23:2–3). Instead of “doing” the law the scribes and Pharisees are caught up in an outward adherence which misses the heart of the law. This absent center though, is the prototypical and universal human problem – culture, religion, or the individual subject revolves around a reified absence. This is the very definition of sin.

On the other hand, Christ is understood not as a disjunction or discontinuation of the law and the Hebrew scriptures, but as the point of mutual illumination. Matthew (chapter 1) depicts Jesus in two origin stories, which duplicate the book of Genesis (but here is the true origin or true Genesis). The word genesis (γένεσις) is used some ten times in the Septuagint version of Genesis and it is probable that by the time of Matthew’s writing “Genesis” had been adopted within Greek-speaking Jewish communities as the formal title of the book. The echo of Genesis is evident in the specific phrase “The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah” – which literally reads, “the book of the genesis of Jesus.” (This phrase occurs in Genesis 2:4 and 5:1.)

The birth narrative (Matt. 1:22-23) contains the formula Matthew uses throughout his Gospel to describe Jesus’ relationship to Judaism. “Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord.” “Fulfilled” can be read as, “to bring to its designed end” or “to bring to its fulness” (pleroma). Jesus is not depicted as challenging Judaism, but as standing within it – fulfilling it and even defining it. That is Judaism is not brought to its designed end apart from Christ.

The point of Matthew’s formula is too simplistically described as prophecy and fulfillment, as many of the passages he sights are not prophecy, but Jesus fills out the Hebrew scriptures. Matthew would say “fulfilled,” as Jesus, the substance, fills up the scriptures of Israel in a substantially new and unexpected way. Jesus is not moving beyond Torah, but embodies Torah. “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (Matt 5:17). Jesus is upholding, bringing to life, or bringing Torah to its designed end.

As Richard Hays writes: “Matthew’s language and imagery are from start to finish soaked in Scripture; he constantly presupposes the social and symbolic world rendered by the stories, songs, prophecies, laws, and wisdom teachings of Israel’s sacred texts.”[9] The world of the Hebrew scriptures is precisely the world occupied by Christ. As Roy Fisher describes, “Matthew is envisioned as incorporating Torah into his work, such that we now envision Matthew’s composition to be taking form within a Torah-formed space.”[10] As Zetterholm writes, “A Jew who came to embrace belief in Jesus as the Messiah could not be said to change one symbolic universe for another. To become a Messiah-believing Jew would rather represent a new orientation within the same symbolic universe.”[11]

Jesus is pictured as filling up the righteousness of the law (e.g., as in his baptism). When John objects to baptizing Jesus, he answers, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness (πληρῶσαι πᾶσαν δικαιοσύνην)” (Matt. 3:15). Baptism marks the form, the relinquishing, the self-giving, which accomplishes the fulness of righteousness.  As Fisher notes, “baptism is the form righteousness takes. It is the proper doing necessary to inhabit the shape of δικαιοσύνην” (righteousness).[12] Of course, baptism is a work, or something Jesus does (and in Christian baptism, which all his followers do) but this doing is not over and against the law but is the laws completion. Jesus continually demonstrates his authority through his doing (e.g., baptism, teaching, healing, forgiving, and dying and rising). “This notion of πληρόω neither goes beyond Torah nor does it replace Torah. On the contrary, Matthew’s concept of fulfillment is the inhabiting of Torah through word and deed. This is how Jesus makes Torah complete.”[13]

 The Gospel of Matthew is a case in point of the time bending sense of Christ as the fulfillment (pleroma) and true subject of the Hebrew scriptures and the law, assigning them the definition (the authority and settled meaning) they always were to have. As with the other writers of the New Testament and the church fathers, it is not that Christ is beginning a new epoch in history (from old to new or from Jew to Christian) but Christ occupies and has always occupied the subject position of the Hebrew scriptures.  


[1] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1; Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.22.

[2] St. Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties In Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios; Translated by Fr. Maximos Constas, (Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press) 60.3.

[3] Magnus Zetterholm, The Formation of Christianity in Antioch: A Social-Scientific Approach to the Separation of Judaism and Christianity (London: Routledge, 2003), 96. Cited in Roy Allan Fisher, “Locating Matthew in Israel” (Unpublished dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2018) 92.

[4] Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012) 2. Cited in Fisher, 18.

[5] Boyarin, viii.

[6] Gregory Knight, “The Pharisees and the Sadducees: Rethinking their Respective Outlooks on Jewish Law” 1993 BYU L. Rev. 925 (1993).

[7][7] Ibid, Knight.

[8] Boyarin, xiv.

[9] Richard B Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016), 109. Cited in Fisher, 56-57.

[10] Fisher, 57.

[11]Zetterholm, 6. Cited in Fisher, 91.

[12] Fisher, 84.

[13] Fisher, 87.