3. Dogmatics as an Act of Faith
Dogmatics, according to Barth, is always a part of the work of human knowledge, but a work “under a particularly decisive condition.” (I/1/17) Beyond all the other requirements of the disciplines of human knowledge, dogmatics presupposes Christian faith, and as such “is a function of the Christian Church.”(ibid.) The particular determination for dogmatics is “quite impossible except as an act of faith, in the determination of human action by listening to Jesus Christ and as obedience to Him.” (ibid.)
Dogmatics is therefore in a very unusual (unique?) position as a work of human knowledge: it is conditioned by obedience to a person, not an idea or a method. It is not the sort of determination that a person can apply at will, but is “the gracious address of God to man, the free personal presence of Jesus Christ in his activity” (I/1/18) It is conditioned by the free grace of God, which may be given or refused: “with every statement it presupposes the free grace of God which may at any time be given or refused as the object and meaning of this human action.”(ibid.)
Here follows a long excursus that appeals to St. Anselm and Martin Luther, over against both Protestant Modernists and Søren Kierkegaard, regarding the fitness of the theologian for the task of dogmatics, a fitness determined as much by the theologian’s spiritual condition as intellectual abilities. Following Luther, Barth maintains that the person engaged in theology must heed God’s claim: “Thus true theology is an actual determination and claiming of man by the acting God.” (I/1/19) But the mistake of centering theological knowledge upon humans was already present in ambiguous statements by St. Anselm, and extended to St. Bonaventure, so that later Protestant orthodoxy sought to distinguish between “the theological habitus on the one hand and the faith, or rebirth, of the theologian, on the other.” (ibid.) Pietism and existentialism fulfilled the anthropological turn to the person of the theologian.
The gift of its promise by faith is a divine determination and claiming of the concrete being of man, of myself. Without this, theology would become the irrelevant wisdom of spectators outside the Church. There would be knowledge only in the dependent form of an imitative formal participation in the knowledge of the Church and faith. If the latter were to fail, then, as Anselm rightly stated, such a theology would lose its power of knowledge. theology neither does nor can at any time find human safeguards against the danger of becoming the irrelevant wisdom of spectators outside the Church, and therefore a-theology.(I/1/21)
Neither the Church nor the theologian is in control of the subject of theology. “Dogmatics must always be undertaken as an act of penitence and obedience. But this is possible only as it trusts in the uncontrollable presence of its ontic and noetic basis, in the revelation of God promised to the Church, and in the power of faith apprehending the promise.”(I/1/22). There is no way around this difficulty: it may be unique among the Wissenschaften. It is the mystery of When and Where God is visible or knowable: ubi et quando visum est Deo in the language of the Augsburg Confession, article 5. “Dogmatics is possible only as an act of faith, when we point to prayer as the attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work.” (I/1/23)
Barth underscores in the section the personal involvement or investment of the theologian in the craft of theology, and in the critical habitus of dogmatics. In contemporary North American theology, however, the realities of institutions of higher education usually preclude open discussion of prayer, perhaps in reaction to the pietistic or “evangelical” tendency to substitute warm feelings for clear thinking. Is there ever a happy medium between Athens and Jerusalem?
Rev. and page numbers corrected Oct. 2019