unio mystica
Exploring Barth’s understanding of spiritual marriage reveals his complexity
and according to George Hunsinger he was not always clear in his writings “seeming
to take away with one hand what he has just established with the other.” This was
partially due to his dialectic theology. Other factors create additional challenges for
those interested in understanding him. Not surprisingly Hunsinger declares that “Karl
Barth has achieved the dubious distinction of being habitually honored but not much
read.”^ Hunsinger summarizes some of the key challenges in reading Barth including
his “seemingly interminable sentences”, his style that continually repeats and expands
his thoughts, and his bewildering dialectic.^27
Barth briefly defines unio mystica as “the presence of grace in which God can
give Himself to each individual, or assume the individual into unity of life with
Himself, in the Christian experience and relationship.”^28 His more detailed treatment
of unio mystica comes when he addresses “The Vocation of Man.” Here he declares
“the goal of vocation” is “the fellowship of Christians with Christ.” Clearly Barth
shares the common Reformed understanding that union enables a person to become a
Christian, “[t]he union of the Christian with Christ which makes a man a Christian is
their conjunction in which each has his own independence, uniqueness and activity.”^29
Later he reiterates the importance that “the Christian’s unio cum Christo” is not the
“climax of Christian experience and development in the face of which the anxious
question might well be raised whether we have reached the point, or will ever do so”
(^27) Hunsinger, How to Read Barth (^) , 27, cf. 28-30. cf. Bromiley, Theology of Karl
Barth, 246-7 and John Webster, Cambridge Companion to Barth, 9-12 for additional
challenges in reading Barth. 28
29 Barth, Barth, CDCD IV/2, 55. IV/2, 540.^