The Christocentric Reorientation of Karl Barth's Actualistic Ontology in Gottes Gnadenwahl (1936)

his article comprises an exposition of Karl Barth's Gottes Gnadenwahl (1936). The treatise represents a significant statement of the Swiss theologian's relocation of the centre of theological ontology and epistemology from a locus in temporal actuality to a locus in the actuality of Jesus Christ who is at once eternal and temporal. In this article I will unpack some important implications of this turn to Christocentrism by a close reading of the text, paying close attention to Barth's critical employment of German idealist vocabularies in his development of what might in a qualified sense be called an "actualistic ontology" as a corrective to the metaphysical doctrines formulated by his Latin predecessors. I will set forth the thesis that the Christocentric doctrine of election Barth developed in 1936 is a reflective after-thinking (Nachdenken) of God's unsublatable subjectivity in the framework of the actualistic dialectic: Golgotha is the outward basis of election, and election is the inward basis of the crucifixion.