3. The Problem of Dogmatic Prolegomena
Finally Barth reaches the point of §7:
- Dogmatics is a Wissenschaft that “consciously and explicitly treads its own very specific path of knowledge as specifically defined by its object.” (I/1/287)
- But this specific path has not been agreed upon for the past four hundred (now five hundred) years –such as the profound differences of Barth’s project from Roman Catholic of Protestant Modernist dogmatics (such as Schleiermacher, Ritschl etc.)
- Accordingly, Evangelical dogmatics (in the sense of Reformed) “has to explain to itself why it thinks it should go its own distinctive way and what this way is,” and this is the task of prolegomena, those things that have to be said ahead of the main topic (ibid. –emphasis mine).
- But so far Barth has only defined the criterion of dogmatics (the agreement of Church proclamation with the witness of Scripture), not the application (Anwendung) of this criterion. (Anwendung here suggests usage as well as external application –NB a computer application can be eine Computeranwendung, a usage which Barth would not have known.)
Thus the greater task lies ahead (in several thousand pages!) of the “path of knowledge as such” (Erkentnissweg).
Barth now draws together several strands of his long argument in §§1-6. The promise and task given to the Church is to speak God’s Word to humans. (I/1/288) Barth has considered formally the questions of where and how the Word of god is to be found, what it is, and how it may be known. (§§3-6) The Word of God commissions an identity of God’s Word with human words, human work; “Church proclamation has to become what it is when seen from the standpoint of the promise and the task.” (ibid.) This becoming what it is signals the task of dogmatics: to test, criticize, and correct the actual proclamation of the Church at any given time.
Barth has traced the ways in which God’s Word concretely confronts Church proclamation in the form of Holy Scripture, which is the witness of God’s revelation given to the Church. Thus far Barth has addressed the criterion of dogmatics. But now how is he to go one, to apply or define the dogmatic path of knowledge so as to get to the point of all this? What choices can be made? It cannot be simply arbitrary and still be faithful to the task.
Barth must now go back to that point where dogmatics has already encounter proclamation and Holy Scripture in their interrelationship: the problem under the denominator (Nenner) of Proclamation, Verkündigung und Wort Gottes as Verkündigung und Heilige Schrift –a telling metaphor from mathematics (again!). This was the content of §4 (The Word of God in its Threefold Form), the implication of which is the Ernkenntnisweg or path of knowledge now under discussion: two forms of the Word of God. How are we to go this interrelationship?(–NB this is far from defining what the Word of God either is or can be)
- The relationship must be understood “when we understand the Bible as the sign of the promise set up in the Church, namely as the witness of God’s revelation” (I/1/288) –what it is to acknowledge this sign, in the Church, and to hear and accept it as such.
- The relationship must be understood in the fact that human words in Church proclamation “can and should become God’s Word in virtue of the promise –the German constructs this more actively,das menschliche Wort in der Verkündigung der Kirche laut der Verheißung zum Gottes Wort werden kann und soll. (I/1/289=KD I/1/306) Strictly corresponding to the doctrine of Holy Scripture, Barth must set out “an equally explicit doctrine of Church proclamation.”
- This relationship would be left “strangely in the air” (würde . . . merkwürdig in der Luft stehen) if the question of the Word of God itself as as such were not also raised in a completely new way. (ibid.)
Barth’s whole point “consists in the fact that in both Holy Scripture and Church dogmatics we are dealing with the Word of God.” (ibid.) Note that he stated in Church dogmatics, not in Church proclamation, but the German far less suggests an equivalency. The distinction is that in Holy Scripture “we have simply to find” the Word of God (not so simple, really!) so as concerns the task of dogmatics, while in proclamation we have not so much to find it as to inquire after it, investigate, and interrogate proclamation with reference to the Word of God. How can this correspondence arise? It arises out of the fact that “the Bible and proclamation are or can become God’s Word,” not spun out of the void (nicht aus der Luft gegriffen –another reference to Luft), and the three forms of God’s Word itself: God’s speech, God’s act, and God’s mystery, informs this transformation of human words, but need not be repeated explicitly. (See §5).
Barth does wish to clarify explicitly one point: As the Word of God reveals itself, the Bible and proclamation are (or become) the Word of God.” (I/1/290) The third and decisive form of the Word of God is revelation, “God’s Word in an absolute sense apart from any becoming, the event of God’s Word in whose power the Bible and Proclamation become God’s Word.” (I/1/290). This local concept of revelation “must give us the key to understanding of the relations between the two” forms, the Bible and proclamation. This is not some general inquiry into a concept of revelation –but rather asks “about the revelation in terms of which the Bible and proclamation both relate in what is also then, a mutual relation,” (ibid.) a “concrete concept of revelation which the Bible attests to have taken place . . . the concrete bracket which embraces a specific past, the epiphany of Jesus Christ, and what is always a specific future, the moment when [humans] will hear God’s Word, int he Scripture that is adopted by the proclamation of the Church or in the proclamation of the Church which is set in motion by Scripture.” (I/1/290-291) It is this local concept, and “this concept alone which that interests dogmatics.” (I/1/291) Any other inquiry after general revelation may be a good and necessary discipline, but is not dogmatics.
This wissenschaftliche Untersuchung can only occur by “first considering and analysing the fact of this revelation –obviously the revelation which is attest to have taken place in Scripture.” This analysis or investigation “can only be a development of what has always played a distinctive role in dogmatics under the name of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.” (ibid.) The dogmatician must first investigate the concept of revelation in order to clarify the presuppositions of the doctrine of Holly Scripture and the doctrine of Church proclamation, which is the dogmatician’s practical concern. Investigation of this local concept of revelation belongs to the beginning of the whole. Consequently, Barth will set out three chapters on revelation, Holy Scripture, and the Church’s proclamation, expanding on the previous §§4 and 5. Barth will concept on their inner structure and mutual relations more than on their forms. Where previously proclamation was the originating and presenting question (what Barth calls the “problematic factor”), now the doctrine of revelation will be the starting point that will lead to investigation, analysis, and critique of the Church’s human words of proclamation.
The following chapters will then concern God in His Revelation, then the Triunity of God, and a chapter on each person of the Holy Trinity (§§8-12) of Volume 1, The Doctrine of the Word of God.
Rev. and page numbers verified, April 2020