We have seen how Barth developed a theology of divine relationality that offered real value to theological discussion—and, in turn, to Christian counseling. Yet this movement also came with a cost. When God’s relational identity is articulated primarily through divine activity rather than grounded first in God’s eternal absoluteness—His fullness of being apart from creation—the doctrine of God is subtly redefined. What is eroded is not merely stability, but the confession that God is who He is prior to and apart from His saving acts.
Two voices can help us discern that cost. First, Katherine Sonderegger argues that much modern Trinitarian theology has unintentionally displaced the doctrine of God by locating divine identity almost exclusively within God’s redemptive activity in history. In its effort to emphasize God’s relationality, self-giving, and nearness, modern theology has increasingly defined who God is by what God does for us. Trinity effectively becomes soteriology to many of these theologians. This methodological reversal does not merely rearrange Trinitarian language; it places pressure on the doctrine of divine absoluteness by allowing God’s eternal identity to be defined by historical action. “We know God in His Economy, it is often said, or not at all” (Systematic Theology, vol. 2. xvii).
Sonderegger contends that this shift risks obscuring God’s ontological fullness, simplicity, and self-sufficiency. When divine being is too closely identified with divine action, God’s eternal life is reduced to a narrative of salvation history, and God’s perfection apart from creation is diminished. She writes:
Trinity is not at its fundament a Mystery about Persons. Nor is it basically and at ground a form of Christology. The Trinity, in its full and primary form, does not conform to the history of its articulation and definition; Trinity, as metaphysical Truth, does not mirror the rise and polemic of the early church. It is not a subspecies of anything else: Christology, soteriology, liturgy, or late antiquity. Trinity is the Mystery of the Holy God; as such it is properly basic and rests on nothing else and belongs to no other school. It simply is the Holy Life of the One God, the Movement and Perfection of the Good God. (Ibid. xix-xx)
Against the trend, she insists that God must be confessed as fully, eternally, and gloriously God apart from his works, even while those works truly reveal him.
For Sonderegger, the doctrine of the Trinity must be grounded first in God’s unity, aseity, and holiness, not in the drama of redemption. God’s triune life is not constituted by his saving acts but freely expressed through them. To preserve the truth of God’s grace, freedom, and reliability, theology must resist collapsing God’s eternal being into God’s historical self-disclosure.
Barth’s move toward identifying God’s being with God’s act significantly reorders the way divine identity is articulated. Sonderegger argues that modern Trinitarian theology—shaped heavily by Barth—allows God’s acts in salvation history to functionally determine what can be said about God eternally, granting the economic Trinity methodological priority over the immanent life of God. What is at stake for Sonderegger is nothing less than whether God remains absolute—whether His triune life is confessed as complete, perfect, and self-sufficient apart from creation. She writes:
The renewed interest in the doctrine of the Trinity in the West…has come to be known as the “Trinitarian revival” and closely associated with the work of Karl Barth and Karl Rahner. In them, an axiom has come to the fore that carries profound strictures for Trinitarian construction: “The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity, and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity” in Rahner’s lapidary phrase…Barth and Rahner identify the Immanent Trinity with the economic so that the God encountered in Holy writ just is the Eternal, Holy, and Living God. The Triune Lord is the God of our salvation…In just these ways, Trinity becomes a type of Christology. In Rahner’s words: Trinity is soteriology, the event of our saving encounter with God. (Ibid. xvii)
Fundamentally, this starts to sound like God is only God in His relation to us. If so, divine absoluteness is no longer a confession about who God eternally is, but a description of how God relates within history. That is a dramatic reordering of divine identity. The concern here is not merely academic ordering, but whether God’s identity remains stable apart from the success or visibility of redemption in human experience
A second voice can help us here too, one from within Barth scholarship itself. In her article “Karl Barth’s Theology of God as Absolute Person,” Sara Mannen wrestles with Barth’s reordering of the divine identity and finds an unresolvable tension.
Mannen argues that Barth seeks to affirm two commitments simultaneously:
- God is absolute, free, and not dependent on creation
- God’s being is fully identified with God’s covenantal decision in Jesus Christ
Mannen’s concern is not simply logical coherence, but whether Barth’s framework can sustain a meaningful doctrine of divine absoluteness—one in which God’s being is not exhausted by any single historical enactment, even election in Christ. The difficulty, she contends, is that Barth also continues to affirm counterfactual possibilities—claims about who God could have been or what God could have done otherwise. These counterfactuals are necessary for Barth to preserve divine freedom and absoluteness. Yet they sit uneasily with his insistence that God’s being is fully and definitively identified with God’s actual self-determination in Christ.
Mannen’s central claim is that this tension cannot be resolved within Barth’s framework as long as decision is treated as foundational to God’s being. If God’s identity is constituted by a concrete historical decision (election in Christ), then meaningful counterfactual freedom becomes difficult to sustain. Conversely, if counterfactual freedom is preserved, then God’s being cannot be fully identified with that decision. In her own words:
Counterfactual freedom in God’s primal decision secures God’s personal communicative freedom to be pro nobis. Barth’s confusing affirmation of counterfactuals and the identification of Jesus Christ with God’s being cannot be overcome when the concept of decisions is foundational to God’s being and absoluteness, and this requires re-thinking necessity and divine personhood. (International Journal of Systematic Theology. 26:1. 2024. p. 47)
In other words, defining God’s being as his act (in this case the decision of covenantal election in Christ), contradicts Barth’s desire to preserve ontological freedom. God cannot be identified solely by His action and free to perform some different or contrary action. Mannen is right to conclude that this would lead us to rethink key aspects of our doctrine of God.
So, from both an external critique, and from an internal critique, we find Barth’s theology of divine relational identity is ultimately unstable. If this account were true, God’s identity would be tethered to the visibility and success of redemptive history rather than grounded in His absolute being. In that case, we would lack the kind of assurance of God’s character that suffering souls desperately need in counseling. And this is where we will turn in our next post.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 