God is relational but how we ground this theological truth matters greatly, as we have seen. Much of modern theology affirms a God whose relational identity is articulated primarily through His activity. While this approach is often presented as a defense of divine freedom, it also quietly reshapes the classical confession that God is absolute—fully complete in Himself and not constituted by His actions toward the world. Much of this perspective stems from the theological work of Karl Barth. The famed German theologian had great intentions behind his theological framework, but the move toward defining God’s relational identity primarily in terms of activity comes at a high cost. This post explores how a well-intentioned attempt to safeguard God’s personal nearness reshaped the way modern theology understands God’s relational identity—and why that legacy still shapes Christian counseling theology today.
The Rise of a Relational Emphasis
While Karl Barth is not the originator of functional theology, he is its most important architect. In the spirit of Kant, German Liberalism had an allergy to abstract thought about God and talk about “God in Himself.” Classical Christian theology, conversely, had long insisted that God’s absoluteness—His fullness of being apart from creation—was not an abstraction to be avoided, but the very ground of His faithfulness and freedom. The theological education that Barth received would have instead emphasized religious experience, ethical ideals, the historical Jesus research, and moral consciousness. His professors (Wilhelm Hermann and Adolf Harnack, to name a few) would have taught him to distrust abstract metaphysics. As a young student Barth initially embraced these teachings, but all of that began to change when World War I erupted. The wickedness of the war taught him that a theology grounded in human experience, culture, or moral ideals cannot restrain evil.
What Barth does theologically at this point is reject Liberalism conclusions, but he didn’t reject all that he had been taught. He retained, in particular, its allergy to abstraction. He redirected that allergy toward Christological concreteness.
Barth believed that God can be known only where He reveals Himself. And God reveals himself decisively in Jesus Christ. So, God is who He is in the act of this self-revelation. For Barth, God is never reduced to an abstract essence behind Christ. Thus Barth developed a theology of functionality:
- God’s being is in act
- God is who He is in His decision
- Election is God’s self-determination
At this point, a critical question emerges: if God’s being is identical with His act, and His act is historically enacted in Christ, then in what sense does God remain absolute—complete in Himself apart from His relation to the world? This emphasis on revelation and act initially served Barth’s pastoral concerns well. But here is where the critical theological shift happened. Barth did not merely say, “God reveals himself in action.” That’s uncontroversial. Rather, Barth increasingly suggested that God’s very being is identical with this act of self-determination in Christ. This meant that in Barth’s teaching the economic Trinity pressed into the immanent Trinity, placing strain on the classical claim that God’s inner life—and therefore His absoluteness—is not constituted by historical action, even redemptive action. Later theologians will build on Barth’s teaching and emphasize the ideas of God-as-decision, relationality as enacted rather than eternal, function over essence (even if unintentionally).
Barth had a good desire to preserve both the true freedom of God and the genuineness of His offer of grace to us. Barth was concerned that the theology of his time had domesticated and flattened God and had made salvation and grace an automatic, a given based on the metaphysical nature of God. This seemed to suggest that God had to save us based on who He was not on His own decision and intention. It made grace feel cheap. Ironically, Barth’s effort to defend divine freedom and autonomy would eventually lead many of his theological heirs to redefine absoluteness itself—not as God’s fullness apart from the world, but as His freedom exercised within relation and decision. Barth’s theological framework sought to defend divine autonomy and genuine grace, but it came at a cost.
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