Theology and Church. Karl Barth
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it is only at the end of the work of dogmatics that it will be possible to expound properly an adequate epistemology. And yet, just because theological knowledge is confronted with the primary and ultimate objectivity of God, and must in accordance with its nature and freedom ‘break’ its theological formulations in recognition of their inadequacy and use them in all their noetic and ontic truthfulness in pointing beyond themselves to the one Truth of God, theological knowledge can never come to an end, but is by its very nature, at least for mortals on earth and pilgrims in history, a perpetual inquiry and a perpetual prayer that take place in the interval between the inception of faith and final vision. There will be no possibility therefore of abstracting from the substance of theology some final theological method which can then be wielded magisterially to subdue all doctrines to some rigid pattern, and there will be no possibility of reaching final solutions to theological problems—true prayer to the living God is unceasing, and true theological inquiry is unceasing worship and adoration. But this would, Barth insists, be prayer and worship without faith in the hearing of prayer and without trust in the grace and truth of God if theological thinking in the prosecution of its inquiry were not entirely certain of its object, and therefore ready to pursue its task in reliance upon the creative and normative activity of the object of its knowledge.
Theological certainty is pivoted upon the object, never pivoted upon the subject of the knower but because it looks for justification not at its own hands, nor on the ground of its own activity, but solely at the hands of God and solely on the grounds of his grace, it will be no less but even more ready to venture forth at its own level with absolute confidence and in its unconditional demands for precise doctrinal formulation. Thus when theological activity engages in self-critical questioning and in acknowledgement of the inadequacy of its own formulations of the Truth, that is not because it engages in doubt or because it is sceptical of its function, but on the contrary because its absolute certainty reposing upon the object requires of it humility and repentance. It is this certainty of the object that lets the theologian know that for all the questionableness and inadequacy of his own human employment of human forms of thought and speech, his theological understanding is not for that reason false, for the truth of his thinking stands or falls with its relation to the object, and derives not from the truth of itself but from the truth in the object towards which it points. By claiming truth in itself, it would become false, for it would arrogate to itself an ontic necessity and truth that belong only to the object, and so would betray its theological thinking into some form of ideological interpretation or speculation, or confound its own objective statements with the independent objectivity of the Truth of God. The truth of theological statements is linked with the fact that considered in themselves they have no truth of their own, but bear witness to the one Truth of God which is their sole justification and substantiation.
When we ask what the contribution of Karl Barth is, through a constructive dogmatics built up in this scientific manner, we may answer by drawing parallels between his work and that of Albert Einstein and Nils Bohr in the realm of pure natural science. If Einstein’s immense contribution lies in the fact that he has penetrated down into the deep rationality of the universe of nature and laid bare its fundamental simplicities in a logical economy that is profoundly illuminating for the whole world of natural science and immensely fertile in the solving of many of its most difficult problems, and if in doing that Einstein’s thinking involves the establishing of the age-old inquiry of science more securely on its proper axis in spite of the revolutionary effects of his theory of relativity, then mutatis mutandis, that, it can be said, is also the contribution of Karl Barth in the realm of theological science. For on the one hand he has penetrated into the deep objective rationality of theological knowledge and laid bare its basic simplicities which are proving immensely fertile throughout the whole realm of theological inquiry, and at the same time has through that attainment of a fundamental, theological economy established the catholic faith of the whole Church on a foundation that cuts across the theologies of East and West, Roman and Evangelical thinking, and presses in the most startling way towards a unitary understanding of the historic faith of the Christian Church in its one Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
If the contribution of Nils Bohr in the realm of physics can be said to lie in the construction of an interpretation of nuclear activity that calls for a logical reconstruction of classical physics and mechanics, and so opens up in an astonishingly new way the relation of logic to being or rather of being to logic, so it must be said that the work of Karl Barth calls for a radical reconstruction both of Mediaeval and Neo-Protestant thought-forms, for only in breaking through these historic ways of thinking can we carry out the scientific task of theology in seeking to let our minds be utterly obedient and faithful to what is revealed from the side of the objectively given. Here there opens up a way of articulating theology within the essentially a posteriori and dynamic mode of modern thinking that is yet basically realist, in the sense that it is wholly devoted to its object, and will have nothing to do with the elaboration either of an existentialist ideology or an independent ontology. It will take generations to measure the significance of Barth’s Herculean efforts in positive theology, but it is already clear that the whole of future theological thinking will have to reckon with what he has laid bare in the inner structure of catholic and evangelical doctrine, and with the central and dominant significance for all theological thinking he has uncovered in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We have examined and traced out the road travelled by Barth in his break-away from the subjective-idealist theology of Neo-Protestantism to positive, catholic, and evangelical dogmatics conceived and elaborated in the scientific manner. It is through looking at Barth’s starting-point as well as at the goal of his thinking that we can appreciate the place and significance of the essays collected and published in this volume. They range from an early review-article of 1920 on the relation of Christianity to history to an essay on the critical bearing of Roman Catholicism on the Protestant Church of 1928. In them we see Barth listening to criticism from unusual sources, in an open-hearted readiness to let himself, and evangelical theology in which he stands, be questioned down to the bed rock in order to determine its foundations, but in them, too, we see Barth wrestling with the inheritance of Protestant theology, from the Reformation and from the nineteenth century particularly, and rethinking what he has learned from his own esteemed theological teachers like Wilhelm Herrmann, in order to break a way through their frame of thinking, and to let the positive Word of God speak again in its native force and creative impact. This is essentially the stage of his thought when he engaged in stringent dialectical thinking in order to let the opposite poles of thought have freedom of movement, if only to get away from the way in which all the great distinctive differences between God and man had been so planed down that the line ran from one to the other in a gentle declivity or a gentle ascent, depending on the direction one travelled. The more cleanly that was done, the more deeply he penetrated into the real relations of God and man, the more he was forced to abandon his dialectical thinking, which for all its negatives concealed ambiguous positives, and to work out openly on the basis of the Word of God a positive understanding of the way from God to man and of the corresponding way from man to God. All the way through one can see struggling together his concern for a biblically grounded theology which he inherited from Calvin and his concern to think it out in the wealth of modern thought which he inherited from Schleiermacher—the interest in biblical exegesis and the interest in culture hold him in a tight grasp, and if he finds that culture must be searched to its foundations by biblico-theological criticism it is not that he is in any sense a Philistine or depreciates the developments of history, but rather the reverse, and if he insists on a theological exegesis and manifests his discontent with biblical scholars who will go no further than elucidating the text from historico-critical and grammatical or perhaps from phenomenological standpoints alone, it is not that he is an opponent of careful Old Testament or New Testament scholarship, but that he wants this scholarship to do its proper work in penetrating into the inner logic of the biblical teaching and so laying bare the Word in the words.
This becomes his chief theological concern, to get at the significance of the Word of God, and of a theology of the Word as distinct from a theology that is only a reflection upon faith. Here it is perhaps the essay on the place of the Word in modern theology from Schleiermacher to Ritschl that is most revealing. On the one hand, he wants to distinguish the Word of God from history—that is an interest of the first essay in the volume which reveals the enlightening