1. The Problem of Dogmatics (part 1)
Although I have been committed to this blog now for eleven years, I am not as far a long as I had hoped. I have been occupied with many other necessary and important things in my work, and I have done. Now is a time when I can return in a more considered fashion and pick up the threads. Barth’s devastating critique of religion and religion in Christian faith is a necessary corrective at all times to be borne in mind as he charts the course and limits of dogmatics in the Church. So I resume.
“The Problem of Dogmatics” is the principle topic of §7; in the English study edition this first section requires 25 pages, the second section (“Dogmatics as a Science”) by comparison 12 pages, and the third section (“The Problem of Dogmatic Prolegomena”) only five. Barth’s critical moves in this first section provide a structure upon which he connects his rich, polyphonic thinking.
The criterion of dogmatics is “the standard by which dogmatics must measure Church proclamation [which] should now have become provisionally comprehensible in all its incomprehensibility.” (I/1/248) This task of examination, “in respect of [Church proclamation’s] agreement with the Word of God, its congruity with what it is trying to proclaim” requires the Church to dissociate “proclamation and the Word of God in thought, not in order to measure the Word of God by its proclamation, but in order to measure its proclamation by the Word of God.” (I/1/250)
Can the Church do justice to this task? Is there any possibility of doing it? “If there were no such possibility, we should be faced by a remarkable dilemma.” (ibid.) Dogmatics “might still scrutinise Church proclamation in many different ways”(I/1/251)–such as philosophy, psychology–“always on the assumption that in this way justice is done to the inconceivable true criterion of theology, the Word of God.”(ibid.) The theology of Modernist Protestantism understood that it had lost the proper (“proper” and “appropriate”) criterion inherited from Reformation theology, “but it no longer understood its dignity, its character as a final court of appeal.”(ibid.) Because Modernist Protestantism no longer understood the criterion of Reformation theology as such, and seized upon other criteria to replace that. “It was out of good intentions rather than bad intentions that it became as philosophical, as moral, as secular, in short, as culturally Protestant as it became and continued to become in ever new forms throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and on into our own.” (ibid.) It could no longer regard the Word of God as an entity distinct from its own proclamation. “It therefore set up this cultural awareness as a surrogate in the place of the Word of God which bad now lost all concreteness for it and had volatilised into a mere idea. And it now judged according to this surrogate.” (I/1/251-252). But four serious problems arise when it did (or does) so.
- How do we know that this process of losing is good and necessary, “whose results one can and should simply accept?”
- How do we know that newly selected criteria are really commensurate to replace the lost old criterion, “whether in applying them we are not causing confusion where there should be order and destroying where we ought to build?” (ibid.)
- “How do we know whether here . . . we are not decisively in error in the very fact that, however good our intentions, we even look around for criteria, choose them, and set them up as such?” (ibid..)
- How do we know whether any criteria can replace the Word of God, or whether we should accept the impossibility of seeing the Word of God concretely . . [and] renounce all critical concern for Church proclamation, i.e., all theology?
In other words, give up and go home? These questions will only bother those who have not already “lost sight of the Word of God as a concrete independent criterion” (I/1/252)
The act of raising these four questions appeals “to the simple fact that Church proclamation, whether this be understood or not understood, whether it is inwardly reasoned out or merely a matter of tradition, is in fact confronted with the Bible. So long as this confrontation is not set aside, no one can truly say that the problem does not exist for him.” (I/1/254)
Barth’s crucial move comes next: he appeals to the existential situation of “the parson in the pulpit” who “has to say something somehow, but has to say it in face of the open Bible and supposedly in accordance with the Bible and in exposition of the Bible.” (ibid.) Even those outside the Church must then admit “there is at the very lowest the possibility of a protest against the introduction of other criteria of Church proclamation.” (ibid.) “[I]t might be that the Bible has already spoken or will speak to us again as the Word of God and that we have to think and judge in this matter, not as outsiders, but as those who stand on the Church’s own ground. Considered as a human place of human willing and doing, the Church rests, not on the presupposition, but very definitely on the recollection and the expectation that God in fact has spoken and will speak the Word to us in the Bible. Can one stand in this recollection and expectation, and to that extent in the Church, without having to raise those four questions?” (I/1/254-255)
Barth then presses four distinctive responses:
- “If it is true that we no longer know concretely whether and how far the Word of God is the standard by which Church proclamation is to be measured” then must we not have to accept this as “a sign of the wrath of God, a trial of faith, a falling into the consequences of disobedience in which one cannot be a mere spectator of oneself, with which one cannot come to terms in the Church?” (I/1/255) On the contrary, “realising that it is a matter of divine chastisement, one can only reply by crying to the hidden God that He will give again the standard that has been lost.” This is consistent with the character of real faith, which can fall at any time into unbelief and irrelevance, but can overcome such temptation: “Faith does not make a virtue of necessity.” (ibid.) “Faith does not make a virtue of the necessity. Even and precisely in the depths of unbelief faith hears the new summons to faith. . . faith may thus lose theological relevance, but it can lose it only to find it again.”(ibid.)
- Church proclamation cannot “come under other criteria than God’s Word in respect of its content.” It is necessarily exempt from judgements and claims made by philosophy, ethics, or politics, at least in respect of its believed intention “if not in respect of its human motives and forms.” (Here is an opening for a church historian!) Other criteria force the abandonment of “the Church’s undertaking laid upon it by commission and accompanied by the divine promise.” (ibid.) “For the decisive word about its proclamation the Church cannot listen to any other voice than the voice of its Lord,” and an utter lack of leadership would be much preferrable to “the light of strange lights however bright.” (I/1/255-256)
- It is a decisive mistake “to think that other criteria can be sought and chosen and set up in matters of Church proclamation. The criterion to which the Church knows it is subject is not one it has chosen and adopted; it has been given to it.” (I/1/256) When such a criterion “is regarded and acknowledged it can be regarded and acknowledged only in an act of obedience, only in a finding preceded by no human seeking.” When acceptance of this commission and criterion “is regarded and acknowledged it can be regarded and acknowledged only in an act of obedience, only in a finding preceded by no human seeking.”(ibid.) It is “an act of acknowledgment of God’s prevenient goodness.”
- Ultimately any other criteria “are to be rejected as irrelevant and injurious because they cannot serve vicariously as surrogates, because all vicariate is fundamentally impossible here.” Any other criteria of judgement are necessarily those of “sinful and lost [humans] whose word, however profound and true it may be, cannot be recognised as judge over the Word which is addressed in the name of God to these sinful and lost [humans], as judge, therefore, over Church proclamation.” (ibid.) By extension, “trying to serve proclamation on this basis, dogmatics would not serve it with true and serious criticism and correction. Theology itself would be only one of the many forms of dialogue that man has with himself about himself when what it ought to do is to serve the discourse that God directs to man.” The true problem is how a sinful human can possibly be a messenger of the divine Word, with which “even the best-founded and most considered human judgment cannot help.” If Church proclamation, dogmatics, and theology have nothing to say on the basis of the criterion of the Word of God, then this problem would have to be abandoned as useless.
Another possibility exists, however, in which “the Church with its proclamation is indeed left to itself and cast back on its own resources.”(I/1/257). “May not and must not the juxtaposition of God’s Word and Church proclamation be viewed as a relative one?” Is the Word of God not given to the church as the Church of Jesus Christ, such that “on the one hand it can and should proclaim the Word of God and on the other hand it can and should itself regulate, criticise and correct its action in this respect by means of the same Word of God?” (ibid.). This is exactly the Roman Catholic view of the relation of the Bible to the “teaching office” of the church. “It has, of course, the Word of God over it. But it has this over it as it has it in it, indistinguishable from itself.”
In a long note, Barth unpacks this insight. By reading the Bible alongside tradition, the Roman Catholic Church does not read the Bible “in itself, the emancipated Bible, the Bible which confronts the Church as an authority. The fact that the Bible in its own concreteness is the Word of God, and that as such it is the supreme criterion of Church teaching, is not acknowledged here.” (ibid.). “The regula proxima fidei, the nearest immediate plumbline of Catholic faith, is not, then, the verdict of the Bible but the verdict of the teaching office on the Bible.” The Roman Catholic Church “keeps in its own hand both proclamation and also the norm of its necessary criticism, i.e., the Bible correctly understood and applied, which is in fact the norm employed in this criticism.” (ibid.) In the teaching office that Church is both norma normata and norma normans, both ecclesia docens and ecclesias audiens.
This is not only the Roman Catholic view, however, but also that of Protestant Modernism, in which ultimately we “find the Church dependent on itself and left to its own devices.” (I/1/258) Despite the appearance of claims that “Holy Scripture alone must be accepted exclusively and unconditionally as the source of dogmatic work” (Wobbermin, 1932), Protestant Modernism “has the Bible over it only as it has it in it.” (I/1/258) The absence of a modern Protestant “teaching office” is not the point: “The essential point is rather the presupposed relativity of the difference between the Church and the Bible, or the insight into this relativity which is ascribed to the Church, its ascribed competence to determine for itself how far it will let itself be judged by the Bible, and therefore to be finally the judge in its own cause.” (ibid.) Modernism does without the teaching office with reference to “Spirit” (derived from Hegel); nevertheless “the relation of dogmatics to the Bible is understood as a dialectical circle whose course is determined by the dogmatician himself” (I/1/259) The result:
The Church of the present, which always has the Word of God already within itself, is left in splendid isolation. And it is only a secondary question of no great significance whether this isolation is the more impressively symbolised by the Roman Catholic establishment of an authoritative teaching office or by the obvious lack of any such teaching office in Protestant Modernism. The Roman pope infallibly interpreting the Bible and the Neo-Protestant professor of theology who bears the Christian principle or the Christian spirit no less surely in himself than he rediscovers it in the Bible are figures which perhaps stand out equally effectively against the same background. (ibid.)
Barth cautions, however, that there can be no ultimate proof of the claim of the Bible over against the Church –“to prove that we should obviously have to put ourselves in a place above proclamation and the Bible.” (ibid.) In doing so, such a Bible would not be a truly “free Bible” but still be “a Bible made over to use, and thus put as an instrument in our hands.” (ibid.) Barth can only point to this fact (or sign): “The fact is again the significance that the Bible actually has in the Church irrespective of all theories about its significance” (I/1/260)–a significance present in the Roman church despite the fatal doctrine of the teaching office, and equally present in Protestant Modernism despite the equally fatal doctrine of the Christian community, principle, or special competence of the professor.
This significance of the sign of the free Bible in the Church will be developed next in the next post. This significance is a consequence of one of Barth’s classic juxtapositions, seen in the first paragraph of this section: “The Word of God . . . should now have become provisionally comprehensible in all its incomprehensibility.” (I/1/248) This aspect of incomprehensibility is found first there “of the fact that the Word of God is spoken to man,” and second because “we accept and continue to accept the incomprehensibility of the nature of the Word of God in itself.” (I/1/249) What the Word of God is, is only in the fact of its being spoken to a specific, concrete human being at a specific time, which after that event is then either recollection or expectation of God’s speaking. Dogmatics cannot overcome this two-fold barrier: neither in its That (secondary character) nor its What (specific, concrete word): it [sic] “is veiled from each man even as it is revealed to him.” The play upon words in German makes this contradiction clearer: in seiner ganzen Unbegreiflichkeit begreiflich geworden sein . . . indem es ihm offenbar wird, verborgen bleibt (KD I/1/261-262). George Hunsinger identified Barth’s motif of actualism, which is surely present in these passages (How To Read Karl Barth, pp. 30-32 and 67-70).
Rev. and page numbers confirmed, April 2020