Barth's Divine Claim Summary

In Karl Barth’s volume II of The Doctrine of God, he describes the Divine Command Theory and how it applies to man’s actions and morality. Although Barth’s writings can often times be confusing and ambiguous, this writing is better understood if one knows how he defines “claim”. When Barth writes “claim”, what he is really referring to it as is a demand or request from God, this is where we get the term “Divine Claim”. Barth defines the Divine Claim as an action’s moral dignity based on whether God commanded it.
When Barth begins this text, he questions, “Why has man to obey Him? Why God, and not any other authority?” (37). Barth wants to uncover the question of why it is good to obey God and why we should only obey God over any other authority figure. He wants to understand why man follows this command over any other power, divine or human. This is important because we should know why it is right and moral to follow the claims of God.
Barth says on page 565, “The God who is the basis of the ethical claim - the basis that summons man, that wins and convinces him, that moves to the doing of the good…”. When Barth writes this, he means that God is so gracious and incredible to us that we should obey him and his commands because we are just so awestruck with wonder and amazement that we follow his commands with enthusiasm. Barth also writes that God gives more reasons to obey Him other than the fact that he has power. Power is not a qualifier to be followed. Although, God has power, that is not the determinant for man’s obedience to God. These two combined show that other authorities should not be followed. They might have power, but they don’t have the ability to capture people through their sheer