Barth, Thomas, and Mortal Sin

I am sorry I have fallen down on the job. I have failed to update everyone about the Barth conference. I have a few good excuses, but, that aside, the best reparation I can make is to direct you to Travis McMaken's blog. He has given brief updates on the last two days. So visit his site or the individual posts linked below:

Barth Conference Day 2 (well, listed as Day 1 on his blog)

Barth Conference Day 3.
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I do have one thing that I would like to say, however, in regard to the last lecture-block today on the role of grace and justification in the theologies of Thomas and Karl. Both Joseph Warykow (In the RC corner from Notre Dame) and Amy Marga (In the P corner from Luther Seminary) noted the significant overlap in Barth and Thomas' doctrines of justification and even in the relationship of justification to Christian life (i.e., participation in Christ or life in God, depending on who you are talking to).

The point of contact between Barth and Roman Catholicism on the nature of grace and justification was taken from the intro. of Barth's survey of reconciliation CD IV.1, particularly the small print section on pages 84-88, where Barth interacts with Catholic dogmatician B. Bartmann's work from 1929. In this section, Barth begins with a harsh judgment and a touch of dismay. "In the light of the latest doctrine in relation to the Virgin Mary (1950), the proclamation of which has shed a new and garish light on the situation, we can only say that, humanly speaking, they have diverged hopelessly," (84).

Now there is no reason to recount the lectures here, but both Warykow and Marga seemed to agree on one substantial point concerning Barth's interpretation of Catholic theologies of grace. Whether or not Bartmann's theology succumbs to Barth's accusations (namely regarding a supposed bifurcation of grace and concomitantly the entrusting of grace to the human subject in such a way that it can be a used as a commodity by the human regardless of the active presence of God), Barth's criticisms of the "Romanist" perspective of grace do not really hold up when it comes to Aquinas. It must be said, both noted this is to be the case generally speaking, though there might be specific areas of substantial disagreement reaching beyond form and terminology.

I have one area of disagreement I would like to note, and I'll do so by way of a quick and certainly not well crafted hypothetical narrative, told in large part with Barthian dogmatic terminology. So, once upon a time . . .

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Nathan Maddox is a sinful man, a man who quite frequently lives in sin and denies his true reality as bound up and defined de facto by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For, you see, when Nathan sins and lives out a lie against God and himself, when he does so regardless of his acknowledgement of his sin as such, his life is still bound up in the "Yes" of God to him in Jesus Christ. Of course, this "Yes" includes the "No," the judgment of Nathan's denial of his true existence. But, as Barth would say, "the No is said for the sake of the Yes."

Again, in other words, Nathan Maddox, despite his awful ways and works( like bashing peoples mailboxes in with baseball bats, kicking animals, and the like) is hid in the life of Christ because of the first of all of God's ways and works ad extra, namely the election and reconciliation of Nathan Maddox and his fellow creatures. Still, make no mistake! Nathan Maddox and his fellow creatures do sin; they do  the impossibly possible, (see above with the bats and animals).

But there is more to the story. Nathan Maddox also knows that he is an awful, indeed sinful person; he knows he is only reconciled to God because of the person and work of Christ who has, as one contemporary interpreter of Barth has put it, "saved sinful humanity [read: Nathan Maddox] without [his] cooperation or consent," (Neder, Participation in Christ, 46). Nathan Maddox as the finite sinful creature, knows of his de facto status before God and in Christ, and he also knows (again as the finite sinful creature he is) that his own de jure full participation in Christ is, by some measure, an "already and not yet." This makes his subjective participation (though not his objective "status") -- as the same interpreter has put it -- "a teleological reality," (ibid.).

Now, on a day much like today Nathan Maddox wakes up, brushes his teeth, and does the normal things that a created, finite human being might do. But today, in covetousness and anger, Nathan Maddox also does something else. He carries out a plan he has been deliberating for quite sometime. He kills his neighbor, the owner of 1949 Ford Woody. You see, Nathan has wanted a Ford Woody since his junior year of high school, a time period in his life when his own personal tastes for commodities and trinkets took a turn down vintage lane. He has asked God to remove this obsession with created material from him, but his pride and concomitantly his sloth are bound up in the events of his life. He feels as though he prays to no avail, and his lust for a Ford Woody cannot be satisfied.

So, on a day much like today, Nathan Maddox kills his neighbor, steals the 1949 Ford Woody, and is killed in an automobile accident while fleeing the scene. For the sake of the point of the story, we will assume that Nathan Maddox is killed before the Holy Spirit comes to him post-murder event, awakening him to his objective reality in Christ and commanding new life.

Now, for the money question: Upon this hypothetical Nathan Maddox's death, does he "go to hell," whatever that might mean for the Barthian? Put more concretely, is Nathan's election and reconcilation supposedly achieved in Christ without cooperation or consent in any way invalidated by what some, namely Thomas Aquinas, would call a mortal, irreparable sin?

According to Barth, for all intents and purposes (and regardless of what radical Barthians who don't like Barth's objective subjective split think), no. The answer would be no. Nathan Maddox died in Christ, and his life was hid therein. Using the language of Thomas and the Greek metaphysical tradition, the infusion of grace that Nathan Maddox experienced did not become dormant or take flight from his soul. His justification was not taken from him, and as such, his participation in the life of God and his possibility for receiving the Beatific Vision was not annulled because of this so-called mortal sin.

Now, my question: Does Barth have a fundamentally different conception of grace and justification than Thomas Aquinas? Or does he not?