Last week in Daniel Kirk’s virtual Barth reading group, we read through the first part of Barth’s chapter on “Church Proclamation as the Material of Dogmatics.” Here Barth begins to outline the source of dogmatics.
That source, for Barth, is “proclamation.” Proclamation “is human speech in and by which God Himself speaks like a king through the mouth of his herald, and which is meant to be heard and accepted as speech in and by which God Himself speaks….”
“Proclamation” is located in the Church and inheres in preaching and the sacrament. God may speak to us in many ways — for example, in “a flute conerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog,” or in the daily ministry of the local church– and we should listen to this speech. However, this sort of speech is not “proclamation,” not a proper source of dogmatics, because the essential locus of the encounter between God and humanity is the preaching and sacrament of the Church: “preaching with the sacrament, with the visible act that confirms human speech as God’s act, is the constitutive element, the perspicuous centre of the Church’s life.”
For many of us from “low church” evangelical / dispensational or very conservative Reformed backgrounds, all this sounds odd. We are attuned to the Bible as the written, objective locus of dogmatics. Indeed, both the Westminster confessional tradition and the systematic theologies produced by many conservative evangelical scholars (for example, Wayne Grudem) take the Bible to be the source of a system of doctrine that can be deduced and distilled from its pages.
Barth’s approach might perhaps seems a bit less odd for those coming from a moderate Reformed or Wesleyan tradition. The moderate Reformed view emphasizes common grace and general revelation, whereas the Wesleyan traditions refer to the “quadrilateral” — scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. But a significant difference remains, because Barth refuses to locate any source of dogmatics outside the Church’s proclamation. Barth rejects appeals to “general revelation” or “reason” as norms for theology outside Church proclamation. Here seems to reside both a higher — or at least different — pneumatology and a higher — or at least different — ecclesiology than in the moderate Reformed or Wesleyan traditions.
In fact, at first glance, it may seem that Barth would be sympathetic to Roman Catholic views on theological authority. Not so. Indeed, in this section he roundly criticizes Catholicism for what he views as its generally weak approach to preaching, which for him is an essential element of proclamation.
In may ways, then, Barth’s normative posture can be seen as pre-modern and pre-scholastic. Reformed and conservative evangelical dogmatics after the 19th Century tended towards modernism — either in objectifying the written word as a rationalistic sourcebook or in objectifying reason as the sole norm of truth (in liberalism). Catholic dogmatics from about the time of Gregory the Great through the 19th Century tended towards scholasticism.
Barth’s view hearkens back to the Church Fathers, who understood scripture, reason, tradition, and experience all as one unified witness to the Christ uniquely proclaimed and celebrated by the Church. This remains, I think, a vital corrective for those of us in the West, particularly in America, who are the heirs of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy — either in traditions influenced by fundamentalism or traditions influenced by liberalism. But as I’ve hinted at in prior posts, to confront the challenges of Church proclamation in a post-scientific, pluralistic and post-Enlightenment age, we’ll need to think a bit more carefully about those things Barth categorically excludes as normative sources for theology — particularly reason and experience mediated through the scientific study of creation, and reason and experience as lived out in non-Western contexts.
