Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung

Читать онлайн книгу.

Karl Barth - Paul S. Chung


Скачать книгу
which faith in God is grounded. The historical Jesus in a Herrmannian sense is not to be equated with the historical Jesus in historical-critical research because a historian deals only with outer or external history. Therefore, it would be devastating to establish the basis of faith by way of historical-critical investigation.

      Karl Barth’s Earliest Writings

      Both the individualism of religion and the relativism of history homogenize and undermine the claim to revealed truth, whereas the concept of God’s kingdom and its praxis make a claim for the universal validity of revelation. In the framework of liberal theology, divine revelation is no longer at the center because of human claims for the truth as an individual center. Religion is grounded on personal rather than universal validity. As far as the Christian faith does not formulate the universal, responsible, and theological axiom, it strives to explore the content of the truth in terms of the personal ground of religion. Therefore the religious experience comes to the fore, and the relativity of all human knowledge precedes Christian faith, which is grounded in divine revelation.

      From this basic principle of liberal theology, Barth anticipated the consequences of pluralism emerging out of the concept of Christian faith in that there takes place a subjective and religious trustfulness. All things are relative. Barth in this regard stood before the problem of value-relativism. The university-educated student of modern theology, equipped with religious individualism and historical relativism, faced a disadvantage in the ministry compared with a student of the more conservative school. The dilemma of theological value-relativism sharpened itself in regard to the problem of church praxis and its theological legitimation.

      If the witness of all religious experience is accepted as the criterion of Christian discourse on God, theology must abandon an objectively true and obliging knowledge of God and claims to the truth of universality. How is it possible to come to a responsible church action in the Christian community with respect to forms and contents of various religious experiences? Would every church action and every action of religious trustfulness become legitimate in the same way on the basis of religious individualism and historical relativism? The two primary characteristics on which liberal theology is based suggest an inevitable tension between theory and praxis. In the end, liberal theology makes theologians incapable of praxis.


Скачать книгу