Theology and Church. Karl Barth
Читать онлайн книгу.
historical Christianity, as the history of the subordination of the supernatural Kingdom of Christ to the history of man’s achievements and failures. And yet while Barth insists on sharpening the distinction here it is evident that he will have nothing to do with a Word of God that is not directed to the concrete existence and historical life of man. But the awe for history, which had almost clothed it with the aura of divinity, had to be punctured in order that sober historical reflection might play its part as a servant of the creative Word of God and not the part of its gaoler. On the other hand, Barth wants to distinguish the Word of God from the word that man can speak to himself in the depths of his own religious self-consciousness, for theology can make no real claim to knowledge until it can distinguish what is objectively given from its subjective conditions and states. No solution to that problem is really possible through elaborating a ‘scientific’ theological pursuit as the historical reflection and philosophical consideration of the history of religious ideas. All this can quickly come under the critique of one as sharp-sighted as Feuerbach, who without much difficulty can point out that it is but a form of man’s reflection upon himself and his own achievements, and is in the end a species of anthropology and not what it claims to be, a theology.
Through study of the teaching of the Reformation, and historical Reformed and Lutheran dogmatics, on the one hand, as is evident from the essays on Lutheran and Reformed theology here, and through a serious grappling with the problems raised by Roman theology and directed at evangelical theology, on the other hand, Barth attempts to clear the ground for a new theology of the Word which carries its own inner rationality, and is to be distinguished from every mysticism and every romantic idealism that is ultimately concerned with wordless experience of God and that requires to borrow from philosophy or science rational forms for its coherent articulation.
But a theology of the Word carries Barth’s thinking into the doctrine of the Church as the sphere within history where that Word is proclaimed and heard, and the community within which understanding of the Word is demanded and built up. Here the theology of the Word is understood as a necessary function of the life of the people of God and of its mission to proclaim Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth and the ends of the ages. The Church lives by the message it preaches, but its preaching of that message has to be tested, to ensure that it is really preaching the Word of God and not its own ideas or opinions. The relation of the Word of God to the ordering of the life and mission of the Church in the world means that theology cannot escape the questions of ethics, but it does mean that it is essentially a theological ethics that is required for the life of the Church in the world.
Once again this involves for Barth a clarification of his doctrine of the Word and of the Church with that of Rome on the one hand and with the claims and self-understanding of secular culture on the other hand. The discussion with the Roman Church carries Barth into a surprising measure of formal agreement with it in the doctrine of the Church, and yet into the most radical disagreement going down to the question of the justification of faith, which Luther called ‘the article of the standing or falling Church’. But in this discussion Barth has to wrestle with the meaning of doctrine and the problem of authority, that is, the significance of dogma in the history and life of the Church. In these pages Barth’s discussion is carried out through a debate with Erik Peterson, a notable Lutheran theologian who became a Roman Catholic and roused considerable debate. For Barth dogmatics arises out of the critical questions that must be put to the task of interpreting the biblical witnesses and thinking their thoughts after them, in order to press it into theological understanding. At the same time dogmatics must engage in a critical examination of the Church’s teaching, and in a testing of old and new formulations of basic ideas and ways of thinking related to the interpretation of the Scriptures. Behind all this it is the function of dogmatics to inquire into the coherence of the historic formulations of the Church, into its decisions, definitions, and dogmas, and to test their basic correspondence with the Word of God, and so to inquire into fundamental ‘dogma’ interpreted as the basic and determining unity of the Church’s faith. This involves Barth in a searching examination of the basic principles which Roman theology employs in the articulation and systematization of its doctrine, and the binding of it to the mind of the historical Church as it is given magisterial definition through the teaching office. Barth’s thinking and writing in this connexion gave rise to the notorious debates that followed upon this period of Barth’s development with leading theologians in the Roman Church.
The discussion with modern culture, particularly with German culture, was no less acute because of the social and political movements that arose out of it as well as because of the masterful ideology to which it gave rise. It involved for Barth a rethinking of his attitude to the social implications of the Gospel and of the whole problem of Church and State, and his concern to direct the challenge of the Gospel to the very roots of the social and political structures of modern man, where cultural developments were going so obviously astray, as could be seen by the rise of the National-Socialist movement on the one hand and the march of Marxist socialism on the other hand. Barth finds that he must move beyond a dialectical understanding of these questions to a more positive appreciation of the basic intention lying behind European culture, and yet the developing conflict with the Church which he early diagnosed made it even more necessary for the Church to take its stand securely on her one foundation on the Word of God if it was really to be able to declare both the judgements and reconciling grace of God to culture and state. Hence this aspect of Barth’s thinking had yet to reach the really decisive point where the way ahead could be seen as clearly as he saw it in 1933. But there can be no doubt that in these essays that bear here on this question, we can see that Barth has and will not give up his deep appreciation for the responsibility for culture that had been so bravely assumed by nineteenth-century Protestant theology in spite of his radical disagreement with the disastrous line that it actually took.
It was in 1927 that Barth published his first attempt at dogmatics, which he called Christian Dogmatics. That work was to prove the beginning of a few years of even greater self-criticism and clarification. The lecture which he delivered to a conference of ministers in Düsseldorf on ‘Roman Catholicism as Question to the Protestant Church’ lets us see to some extent how his mind is moving, to an even more positive conception of the Word and the Church, and to a critical revision of historical Protestant notions which may help it to recover an understanding of the very ground of its existence in the Word of God. It is not surprising therefore that the revised edition of his dogmatics should bear the title of Church Dogmatics, although before he could rewrite it considerable further thinking had to be done in disentangling his own theology from the remnants of existentialism and in working out the scientific method of dogmatics over against the claims of philosophy and exact science which we have already discussed.
This volume on Theology and Church should be read together with Barth’s account of nineteenth-century theology published in English under the title, From Rousseau to Ritschl (in USA Protestant Thought From …). In that work we can see how patient and sympathetic Barth is with his great predecessors in the history of modern theology, how eager he is to learn from every one of them, even when he must disagree and even when that disagreement is sharp and severe, and how dedicated he is to the task of understanding, with all the previous course of Christian thinking and teaching before him, the positive message of the Gospel, and of aiding his contemporaries in their search for secure foundations upon which to fulfil the task of the Church in preaching and teaching the Word of God. It has led him to speak of God the Creator in such a way that man is not allowed to vanish into nothingness or to be treated as a pawn in the fulfilment of God’s eternal purposes, but is called to stand before the heavenly Father as his dear child, and to live in such a way that his relationship with God is made visible in his daily existence. It has led him to speak of God the Saviour in such a way as to recognize the sovereign freedom of God’s grace in all his ways and works, and yet to recognize in that divine freedom the ground and source of man’s true freedom in which he is called to live as a child of the heavenly Father who in Jesus Christ has come to share his humanity and bids him in obedience to the divine love to share in the humanity of his fellows. It has led Barth to speak of God’s wisdom and patience with men, of his compassion for the world, and of the creative and regenerative work of God’s Word and Spirit for man and all mankind, of his accompanying providence that overrules all the confusion of men, and of the will of God that at last the