Abstract
In Confidence in Life: A Barthian Account of Procreation, Matthew Lee Anderson, Assistant Professor in the Honors College at Baylor University, unearths from Barth’s theology a robust theological pronatalism, despite some apparently anti-natalist threads in Barth’s thought.
The book begins with three chapters of rather strenuous journeying through the thicket of moral philosophers. In each chapter, Anderson summarizes and critiques how specific moral philosophers address questions about procreation. In chapter 1, Anderson addresses ‘The Asymmetry’, a term in moral philosophy that holds that on one side, ‘we have a moral reason to not create a child that we reasonably expect to have a miserable life’ (p. 17, emphasis original). Yet ‘on the other side, the reasonable expectation that the child would lead a very happy life gives us no moral reason to create’ (p. 17). The Asymmetry is a puzzle about theodicy that leads to procreative neutrality at best, and more likely to de facto antinatalism (p. 17).
In chapter 2, Anderson turns to the topics of parenthood, the parent–child relationship, and biological ties. The principal tension here is that any positive reasons to procreate risk elevating biological parenthood over adoptive parenthood (p. 51). In Anderson’s evaluation, none of these moral philosophers offer compelling argumentation for the question of why one might choose to have children by procreation instead of adoption (p. 36).
Chapter 3 discusses the analogy within philosophical literature that life is a ‘gift’. Anderson is unsatisfied with this framing on several grounds. He discusses the ambiguities and technological possibilities around the question of human agency in procreation. He also considers the objection to the ‘life as gift’ framing on the grounds of the prevalence of embryo death, somewhat curiously omitting the parallel issue of maternal death. The force of these three chapters is to highlight ‘philosophy’s self-conscious inadequacy to provide a meaningful account of procreating without articulating the foundations of good and evil and the value of the species’ (p. 80, emphasis original).
Anderson does not address any feminist, post-colonial, or queer critiques of the philosophers he details. This makes sense given that he is primarily interested in the (inadequate) options offered by moral philosophy, over and against contextual or historical concerns or intra-philosophical debate. Still, the moral philosophers’ sterile, acontextual framing of questions about procreation makes them a weaker conversation partner for Barth. One could easily imagine, for example, a non-Western reader being bewildered by the philosophers’ individualistic, rationalistic framing of decisions about procreation. Despite this concern, these chapters are a strong and intentional carrying forward of Barth’s own productive conversation between philosophy and theology (p. 80).
If chapters 1–3 provide an instructional overview of moral philosophy on the topic of procreation (one that illuminates its shortcomings), chapters 4–6 provide a broad overview of Barth’s theology focused on, but extending far beyond, the topic of procreation. Scholars and readers of Barth will appreciate this volume’s sensitivity towards and acquaintance with a wide variety of questions and conversations within Barth scholarship. Furthermore, Anderson’s argument is built not upon proof texts extrapolated to suggest conclusions, but rather upon deep and pervasive currents in Barth’s theology. These aspects make this a rich exploration of wide portions of Barth’s theology and an instructive engagement with current scholarship.
In chapter 4, Anderson discusses the Trinitarian ground of creation and the role that ‘nature’ plays for Barth. Anderson echoes Barth’s own framing that creation is ‘adapted to be a theater of the covenant’ (p. 90, emphasis original). In drawing out these threads of Barth, Anderson realizes that he edges close to the forbidden ‘natural theology’; yet he is firm that Barth belies ‘a willingness to let creation and its immanent orders shape his special ethics’ (p. 93, n. 74). Nature is never an independent or pre-theological concept; rather, it can only be seen and understood rightly ‘within the purview of the covenant’ (p. 92). In response to the philosophers’ question about whether life and ‘the world’ are good, Anderson answers with Barth that the Christian will have neither unqualified optimism nor pessimism; he thus resituates the question in a Barthian grammar of covenant and divine action.
Chapter 5 chronicles Barth’s explicit treatment of procreation in the doctrine of creation. It is a rich primer in the doctrine of creation, given Anderson’s succinct illumination of key themes. After walking through Barth’s readings of Genesis 1 and 2 in CD III/1, Anderson notes that Barth leaves ‘procreation in a precarious theological condition’ (p. 116). Barth has numerous theological pressures ‘against the moral and theological significance of procreating’ (p. 107). Yet Anderson still maintains that there is a ‘presumptive pro-natalism’ in Barth’s thought (p. 127).
Chapter 6 considers: what is this ‘life’ in which humans are to have confidence? Drawing from Barth’s theological anthropology, Anderson edges toward suggesting that since God designed humans (in the image of Jesus) for covenant partnership, the human capacity to reproduce sexually is something that God intended for humans to do not only in the time before Christ, but in all times (pp. 141–42). In other words, procreation was not simply an aid to God’s implementation of ‘plan B’: the birth of a Messiah who would clean up the mess of human sin. Rather the covenant, God with us in Jesus Christ, was the plan all along; this therefore unsettles a segmentation of procreation’s significance within salvation history. In making the claim that bodiliness, in particular sexually dimorphic bodiliness, is essential to the covenant, Anderson participates in a lively debate within Barth studies about gender and sexual differentiation (see p. 145, n. 52 for an overview).
This chapter also addresses Barth’s account of human life in time. In his detailed engagement with such large Barthian themes, Anderson argues for a presumptive pronatalism along several lines. Yet he acknowledges the ambiguity and tension in such an account. He is well aware of the Barthian elements that lead elsewhere. He pivots to the next chapter with this: ‘much hangs, then, on Barth’s argument that the eschatological disclosure of Christ gives a new consecration to marriage but abrogates procreation’ (p. 159).
This observation stands as a wider provocation to theological ethicists. Barth’s situating of procreation’s significance within salvation history, leading to a theological ambivalence about procreation post Christum natum and a redefinition of kinship, is widely prefigured and echoed in theological tradition. It is precisely at this point that theological conversation has often stopped: with a statement about children no longer being necessary after the birth of Christ, and with an ecclesiological reframing of kinship by baptism instead of blood ties. The topic of procreation—if/how it should or does continue, and what significance it might have—is largely neglected. If the whole topic of this book seems bizarre to some, it is likely because it addresses a relative lacuna in theological work.
Even though Barth (and with him, many other theologians and ethicists past and present) rightly affirm that no more children need to be born after the birth of Christ, and ecclesiologically reframe kinship by baptism instead of blood ties, Anderson’s final chapters are a compelling argument that Barth’s thought provides a de facto pronatalism. Again, the core theological question, which Anderson asks of Barth, is whether and how to identify procreation’s eschatological (not only providential) consecration. Even though the Child has already been born, and kinship is through baptism, should Christians continue to have biological children? If so, why, or why not? This question, as Nigel Biggar notes in his endorsement, is highly relevant in an era of anxieties about population decline and corresponding worries about overpopulation and environmental disaster. I add that right-wing nationalist governments, quite obviously on the rise worldwide, seem to require some sort of pronatalism if they are to guarantee a steady stream of the ‘right kind’ of citizens—those born, rather than arrived. Spats during the 2024 American presidential election brought questions about pronatalism to the fore: conservative politicians challenged the moral and political capacity of childless politicians; debates around contraception and abortion remained explosive; and a prominent pronatalist billionaire held (and holds) immense political sway.
Chapter 7 pivots from a critical engagement with Barth to a constructive revision of Barth, using Barth against himself to argue that procreation does have an eschatological consecration. Anderson details Barth’s account of the Virgin Mary before proposing a revised Barthian Mariology. He uses Barth to go beyond Barth in offering ‘a pattern for construing the miracle of the Virgin Birth as a confirmation and reification of ordinary procreation, even in the eschatologically governed life of the church’ (p. 163). An eschatological sanction for procreation provides a crucial theological justification for human procreation post Christum natum.
What emerges is a framing of procreation that takes seriously the work and agency of a woman’s body without compromising Barth’s assertion that God is the absolute ‘whence’ of the human person. (Note: Barth does not hesitate to recognize male agency in procreation; rather Barth’s suspicion of human agency in the incarnation and procreation generally is weighted toward females.) Anderson’s framing of Mary as the first member of the new creation not only dignifies female labour in procreation, but also eases the sharp dichotomy often presumed between procreation in the Old Testament and procreation in the New Testament (p. 189). In order to accomplish this framing of bodily procreation as eschatologically significant, Anderson also engages and suggests a modification of Barth’s account of time and eternity (pp. 191, 194).
A key observation in this chapter is that in Barth’s treatment of parents and children, the boundary case of voluntary orphanhood does not negate procreation but rather is a ‘paradoxical form’ and ‘preservation of’ the creaturely good of procreation (pp. 181–85). Anderson writes, ‘the same logic that relativizes biological bonds also establishes and confirms them’ (p. 181). Anderson makes a compelling defence of this contentious statement, though it is likely to arouse suspicion from theological ethicists who maintain that the eschatological interruption of the kingdom of God provides an expansion of the ethical options, specifically in questions of sexual ethics.
Though this theological backdrop is indeed necessary to argue for an eschatologically sensitive Barthian pronatalism, it by no means clarifies the myriad ethical questions around procreation. Several significant topics in theological ethics stand adjacent to Anderson’s treatment: firstly, questions about whether marriage is the only context for procreation, or whether a single person could pursue having a biological child; secondly, whether marriage is a male–female institution or can be widened to same-sex or non-binary couples, and indeed whether marriage need be an exclusive matter to two people at all; and thirdly, and closely related, the question of a Christian theological and ethical perspective on artificial reproductive technologies.
Anderson’s final chapter supplies reasons to procreate, given his argument for ordinary procreation’s eschatological consecration via a revised account of time and the Virgin Mary. Anderson highlights Barth’s treatment of honour, which falls at the very end of his ethics of creation in III/4. Honour provides a shorthand of sorts to capture the non-competitive interplay of divine and human agency, the irrevocable goodness of creaturely life and action, and the dignified particularity of each human (p. 203). Specifically, people have the opportunity to respond to and affirm God’s bestowal of honour in the human agency and work of procreation. Anderson writes: ‘the socially mediated and divinely established honour of participating through action and suffering in the miracle and mystery of the formation of human life supplies a theologically animated reason to pursue parenthood through procreating’ (p. 229). His reading of honour as a reason to procreate does not, however, lead to a glorification of blood and soil (p. 222). On the one hand, ‘God’s role as the source of the honour of procreative parenthood both relativizes biology and strengthens the basis for the honour that we owe to procreative parents’ (p. 219, emphasis original). Yet Anderson qualifies that honour by closely following Barth in forbidding glorification of the ‘family’ as a theological category (p. 221). This chapter, like the prior one, is an excellent example of an interpretation that improvises beyond Barth, yet remains deeply resonant with the deep bass notes of his theology.
Because Anderson speaks so fluently to nuances and debates within Barth’s theology, scholars of Barth will find much that is stimulating and provocative in Anderson’s argument. Theologians working at the hinge of moral philosophy and theological ethics will encounter a fruitful conversation between the two disciplines. Theologians and ethicists working in issues related to kinship, gender, and sexuality will encounter a revised reading of Barth which has the possibility to generate new conversations and conclusions in these areas. Yet it would be unfortunate if contentious debates about sexuality and gender obscured what is here offered: a tightly argued, deeply theological Barthian response to a question that remains both foundational and strangely neglected in theological ethics: ought we to have children? If so, why?