Pactum Salutis

Barth (CD, 4.1) offers this challenging evaluation of the Protestant Orthodox notion of a Trinitarian covenant:

“For God to be gracious to sinful man, was there any need of a special decree to establish the unity of righteousness and mercy of God in relation to man, of a special intertrinitarian arrangement and contract which can be distinguished from the being of God? If there was need of such a decree, then the question arises at once of a form of the will of God in which this arrangement has not yet been made and is not yet valid. We have to reckon with the existence of a God who is righteous in abstracto and not free to be gracious from the very first, who has to bind to the fulfillment of HIs promise the fulfillment of certain conditions by man, and punish their non-fulfillment . . . .

“It is only with the conclusion of this contract with Himself that He ceases to be a righteous God in abstracto and becomes the God who in His righteousness is also merciful and therefore able to exercise grace. In this case it is not impossible or illegitimate to believe that properly, in some inner depth of His being behind the covenant of grace, He might not be able to do this. It is only on the historical level that the theologumenon of the foedus naturae or operum can be explained by the compact of the Federal theology with contemporary humanism. In fact it derives from anxiety lest there might be an essence in God in which, in spite of that contract, His righteousness and His mercy are secretly and at bottom two separate things. And this anxiety derives from the fact that the thought of that inter-trinitarian contract obviously cannot have any binding and therefore consoling and assuring force. This anxiety and therefore this proposition of a covenant of works could obviously never have arisen if there had been a loyal hearing of the Gospel and a strict looking to Jesus Christ as the full and final revelation of the being of God. In the eternal decree of God revealed in Jesus Christ the being of God would have been seen as righteous mercy and merciful righteousness from the very first. It would have been quite impossible therefore to conceive of any special plan of a God who is righteous in abstracto , and the whole idea of an original covenant of works would have fallen to the ground.”

This, as I say, is challenging, but if I’m understanding Barth here it seems to rest on a misunderstanding of what the pactum salutis is aiming for. It is not a plan to reconcile two attributes of God that are estranged from each other. It is instead a plan that determines the particular form God’s merciful righteousness and righteous mercy will take in the history of redemption. This does assume a distinction between what God might have done and what God chose to do; but that is not the same as saying that God’s being is righteous or merciful in the abstract. It is simply saying that God is free.