1. The Question as to the Nature of the Word of God (Excursus)
This excursus marks a significant shift in Barth’s thinking from his original publication of Die christliche Dogmatik to the present Die kirchliche Dogmatik. In this excursus, Barth summarizes two significant objections, what they signified to him, and why he changed his mind. A great deal of the distinctiveness of the entire Church Dogmatics and be approached by careful examinations of Barth’s second thoughts.
Barth’s first point concerns his previous “existential” mode of analysis, “a transition from a phenomenological treatment to an existential treatment, i.e., from thinking in terms of an outward observer to thinking in terms of an existential participant.” (I/1/125) Such a passage was resisted by reviewers such as Friedrich Gogarten, who asked whether the concepts were properly specified or distinguished. Whatever the outcome of that review, Barth realized that such concepts “whatever their content and mutual relation may be, cannot in any way constitute or signify decisive turning-points on the way of dogmatic thought as seemed there to be presupposed. No matter how philosophers may or may not reach an understanding on these matters, they will do so as philosophers and not as theologians.” (ibid.)
Barth recognized that philosophical terminology, “a linguistic borrowing” may in some contexts be suitable but in others occasion misunderstanding, which in this case promptly arose. (ibid.) “I ought to have had the better judgment to see that to drag in those concepts at that point in relation to what I wanted to say there was a superfluous and dangerous game.” (I/1/126.) Superfluous, because no proof of the doctrine of the Word of God (such as proved by existential thinking) “in any case followed,” and dangerous, because such an intellectual “passage” (from phenomenological to existential thinking) “in obscure combination with the intentions of Roman Catholic and older Protestant theology” might indicate “a kind of grounding of theology in existentialist philosophy.” (ibid.) Whatever the confusion or its resolution, “No serious theological decision is taken in the actual transitions from more to less and vice versa as they can naturally take place in theological trains of thought too.”(ibid.)
That led Barth to his second, more substantial point.
In the “first edition” (Die christliche Dogmatik), the doctrine of the Word of God promulgates two analyses of the human situation, first as preacher and second as hearer of the Word of God (textual §§ 5 and 6). The in §7 followed an analysis of the distinctive knowledge of the Word of God in general. “In the last sub-sections of the three sections there are then annexed to the three analyses as their ostensible results three more precise definitions of the Word of God which together represent what is here to be developed as the doctrine of the nature of the Word of God..” (ibid.)
Barth, on second thought, saw three faults to this arrangement:
(1) The “precise definitions” (almost in the form of appendices) “were by this external placing isolated from the readers’ attention in a way that was fatal to a proper understanding of the whole.” (ibid.) But Barth regarded that content as “the true and to some extent provocative part” of the three paragraphs.
(2) Barth felt he had not succeeded in making the closing parts on the concept of the Word of God illuminating and credible as results “(and happily could not succeed)”. (ibid.)
(3) The unsuccessful attempt to deduce the doctrine of the Word of God at all from the analysis of the situation of the preacher and hearer “involved following a ‘false tendency'” (like his previously criticized application of concepts from phenomenological and existential thinking). The (unsuccessful) attempt was based upon a Church anthropology and “was thus being advanced as the supposed basis on which we know decisive statements about God’s Word..” (I/1/127) This was a false move, leading to a striking statement:
If there is one thing the Word of God certainly is not, it is not a predicate of (sic) man, even of the man who receives it, and therefore not of the man who speaks, hears and knows it in the sphere of the Church. (ibid.)
Here and hereafter Barth parted company with his fellow theologian of crisis Friedrich Gogarten. Gogarten found that Die christliche Dogmatik lacked a “true anthropology” (Barth’s phrase), and speaks in places “now of a God isolated in and for Himself over against man and now of man isolated in and for himself over against God” (ibid., quoting , “Karl Barths Dogmatik,” Theol. Rundschau, 1929, p. 70 ff. on page 72). Barth undertakes a thorough repudiation of such a “true” anthropology: “For I can only regard it as doing great harm to do what happily Gogarten has not found me doing but would like me to have done, namely, setting up a “true anthropology” as “the central task” and “real problem of theology.” (ibid., and referring to Gogarten’s articles)
Gogarten asserted that the theological task was bound to the humanist “humanisation of life,” a position which, even if it were correct before the War (i.e., World War I), in the present (Barth notes) “it can scarcely be said any longer of a large and especially of the younger section of one’s contemporaries” (i.e. the War generation) “that the ‘humanising of life’ … “is a significant concept in their life-consciousness.”(ibid.) One sees here again the impact of the First World War and the gap between Protestant liberalism and the coarseness of Weimar Europe. “Might it not be to-day that a theology which refuses even in method to make common cause with the aforesaid “humanising of life” will be more relevant—if this is the point —than one which admits at the very outset that it can speak only a second word, a word on the situation (the situation outside the Church)?” (I/1/128)
Gogarten’s second concern was Christology: “Must not thought start out,” he says (Theol. Rundschau, 1929, p. 73), “from the man God became?” (ibid.) Barth’s direction is exactly opposite.
In fact theological statements are distinguished from those of metaphysics or morality to the degree that in conformity with the Immanuel that is the content of revelation, they take the reality and truth of which they purport to speak and make it intelligible as reality and truth from God to man. (ibid.)
Church dogmatics as theological propositions, are as distinctive and hylomorphic a “game” of language as any proposed or clarified by Barth’s remarkable contemporary, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
This very long excursus (through I/1/131) continues Barth’s drubbing of Gogarten’s theological anthropology, towards the end of which Barth critiqued the essential unity of Gogarten’s theological anthropology with the old natural theology: “I fail to see how anything other than a new (or rather the old) natural theology can result therefrom” (I/1/130) “This direct discernment of the original relation of God to man, the discernment of the creation of man which is also the revelation of God, has, however, been taken from us by the fall, at least according to Reformation ideas of the extent of sin, and it is restored to us only in the Gospel, in revelatio specialis.” (ibid.)
At length Barth brings back his metaphor of the circle –always a signal that Barth has arrived at a crucial distinction or decision. The only anthropology possible, Barth maintained, consists “simply in a depiction first of the original status integritatis which is indicated in the Word of God itself and manifested in Jesus Christ and then of the status corruptionis which now obtains..” (I/1/131)
The circle between the understanding of God and man of which Gogarten speaks so impressively, the circle in which man’s relationship to God is known, is thus in truth only a single circle, and it is a tightly closed circle. Gogarten, too, speaks of only one circle, and a tightly closed one at that. But it is not clear to me that it remains either. If it is only one, tightly closed circle, then it is impossible even in terms of the concept of creation to leap into it from without, i.e., to advance a common platform on which to agree with the philosopher, be it Grisebach or Heidegger, as to how far movement is possible at all in this circle even as seen from without.(ibid., my underlining)
Barth conclusively declares, “There is a way from Christology to anthropology, but there is no way from anthropology to Christology.” (ibid.) “But the answer to the question: What is the Word of God?, the doctrine of its nature, must no longer seem to be governed by this enquiry. It must not arise in the proximity of a “true anthropology.” It must be developed before this and independently.” (ibid.)
Thus Barth declared the distinctions of his second thought from his first. He decisively repudiated any movement from reflection upon the characteristics of human beings to the reflection upon the nature and identity of God. He declared the proper distinctiveness of independent dogmatic theology from all humanistic philosophy or the “liberal arts” and consequently calls into question the role of theological thinking in the philosophical university.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, Dec. 2019