1. Paul D. Molnar,Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology(London and New York: T. & T. Clark/Continuum, 2002).
2. See Bruce McCormack, 'Grace and Being: The Role of God's Gracious Election in Karl Barth's Theological Ontology', in John Webster, ed.The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 103ff. McCormack makes a crucial error here. He assumes that the incarnation and outpouring of the Spirit are constitutive of the Trinity so that only 'as a consequence of the primal decision in which God assigned to himself the being he would have throughout eternity (a being-for the human race)' (p. 100) can God be seen as the triune God. But that is just the issue. For Barth, God is who he is from all eternity as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit - he does not assign that being to himself. Rather he freely re-affirms himself as the God he is. This need to assign a being to himself is the nub of the difficulty in the rest of McCormack's position, particularly with his view that 'Thedecisionfor the covenant of grace is the ground of God's triunity and, therefore, of the eternal generation of the Son and of the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and Son' (p. 103). But God is self-moved and self-limited and so he can freely determine to be God for us in his pre-temporal eternity and thus execute that decision in the incarnation and outpouring of the Spirit. Yet those actionsad extraare an expression of his freedom to exist as Father, Son and Spirit from all eternity with or without us and are not in any sense constitutive of his triunity.
3. McCormack, 'Grace and Being', p. 101.
4. See Karl Barth,Church Dogmatics[hereafter:CD], 4 vols. in 13 pts. ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956-75), II/1, pp. 526ff.
5. Barth,CDII/1, p. 527, emphasis mine. Barth insists that 'Absolutely everything depends on whether we know God as the One who is omnipotent in Himself . . . Absolutely everything depends on whether we distinguish His omnipotence from His omnicausality: not to the glory of an unknown omnipotent being who is beyond and behind His work; but to the glory of the omnipotent God who is present to us in His work' (CDII/1, p. 528).