Category: Barth

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.

This week in Daniel Kirk’s virtual Barth reading group, we are discussion § 1.2 of the Dogmatics.  Here Barth discusses what comprises a proper prolegomena to dogmatics.

Coming from an Evangelical context, it’s common to take analytic philosophy as the prolegomena to theology.  This is particularly true for neo-Evangelical theologians such as Carl Henry and conservative Evangelicals such as Millard Erickson and Norman Geisler.  Their systematic theologies rest on logical rules such as the law of non-contradiction as applied to what they consider to be empirical observations concerning the propositional content of scripture.  This method leads to an emphasis on rational argumentation, which in turn supports a robust apologetic program. The same observation could be made concerning scholastic Roman Catholic theology.  Indeed, Norman Geisler considers himself an “Evangelical Thomist.”

Barth will have none of this.  For him, adopting anything other than “revelation” as the basis for dogmatics is a form of unbelief and idolatry.  Philosophy, for Barth, is a human construction, and therefore the ultimate ground of rationalistic theologies is man, not God.

The immediate response to this claim is that man is made in God’s image, meaning that human reason and the rules of logic are reflections of God’s own self.  Barth rejects any such notion of the analogia entis.  As he will develop later in his discussion of revelation and the Trinity, Barth — drawing strong support from Martin Luther — takes God to be wholly other, hidden, and inaccessible to fallen humans absent a radical act of grace.

Two very helpful themes can be derived from this section.  First is the limitations of apologetics.  For Barth, apologetics are not merely of limited value — “apologetics and polemics,” he says, “have obviously been irresponsible, irrelevant, and therefore ineffective.”

Second is that revelation is the proper foundation of theology and indeed of Christian epistemology.  As Barth notes,

“the place from which the way of dogmatic knowledge is to be seen and understood can be neither a prior anthropological possibility nor a subsequent ecclesiastical reality, but only the present moment of the speaking and hearing of Jesus Christ Himself, the divine creation of light in our hearts.”

As we will see, and as this quote foreshadows, Barth’s concept of “revelation” certainly is not the same static notion as Henry’s or Geisler’s.

At this point we might begin to wonder, however, about Barth’s anthropology.  Barth will eventually flesh out this brief introduction with a lengthy argument specifically against any sort of anthropological prolegomena to theology, in response to a claim that an earlier version of the Dogmatics relied too heavily on anthropology.  But it is not at all clear that he — or anyone — can escape some sort of a priori anthropological assumptions.  Even Barth, after all, is making a reasoned argument against the use of reason as prolegomena.

For this and other reasons, I will eventually lean towards Thomas Torrance’s softer understanding of the analogia entis and natural theology. It should also be noted here that Roman Catholic theology, after the nouvelle theologie, is no longer predominantly scholastic. Barth and one of the key figures in the nouvelle theologie, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, were famous interlocutors, though this relationship began after Barth wrote Volume I of the Dogmatics.  Balthasar may also be a helpful conversation partner, along with Torrance, as we delve deeper into Barth’s work.

Daniel Kirk is hosting a virtual Karl Barth reading group in which I hope to participate.  We’re commenting this week on section 1.1 of the Church Dogmatics. I had started reading the Dogmatics this past summer so I’m looking forward to this group interaction.

Barth defines “dogmatics” as follows:  “[a]s a theological discipline dogmatics is the scientific self-examination of the Christian Church with respect to the content of its distinctive talk about God.”

I love this definition because it lays some important groundwork.  First, dogmatics is a sort of “science.”  That is, dogmatics seeks to explain some aspect of reality.  It gets at the essences of the way things really are.

Second, dogmatics is an act of “self examination.”  The theme of ever and always getting back to the sources, of critically reappraising our thinking about God, is important to Barth’s project.  The theological task never ends.

Third, dogmatics is distinctively situated within the Christian Church.  The “science” of dogmatics is not like the supposedly neutral, objective enterprise of the natural or social sciences.  Rather, dogmatics asserts its own grounds and grammar, ultimately based in revelation.   As we’ll see, Barth’s doctrine of revelation is both objective and dynamic, rooted ultimately in God’s Triune person.

For Barth, the science of dogmatics “does not have to justify itself” before other sciences that proceed according to their own methods.  This will prove to be, I think, a great strength and a potential weakness in Barth’s project.  Christian theology cannot submit to any standard as final arbiter of its claims other than God’s revelation in Christ, or else it will lose its integrity.  As we move through the Dogmatics, however, we may want to modify or soften some of Barth’s opposition to some kinds of natural theology.

A good conclusion to this brief introduction is the definition of who is a “theologian,” quoted from Johannes Coccejus:  “A theologian is someone who speaks of God, from God, before God to God’s glory.” May it be so!