1. The Place of the Doctrine of the Trinity in Dogmatics
Beginning with §8, Barth begins to fill in the content of dogmatics (doctrinal theology) for which he cleared the space in §§1-7: We come at last to some of the fundamental building blocks of Barth’s thinking about revelation, God, and the church. These thoughts will be developed at great length over the subsequent course of the Church Dogmatics. At this point, Barth is sketching preliminary remarks in such a way that he will build them out as he proceeds.
Barth returns to his first insight: that the Church’s proclamation is to be measured by Holy Scripture, and its faithfulness to the message of Holy Scripture. Dogmatics must set the example for Barth’s corrective to numerous liberal Protestant misconceptions in the 19th and early 20th centuries: not only must it “pay heed to Scripture, not to allow itself to take its problems from anything else but Scripture.” (I/1/295). In so doing it must face “the basic problem,” which is that “the revelation attested in [Holy Scripture] refuses to be understood as any sort of revelation alongside which there are or may be others. It insists absolutely on being understood in its uniqueness.(ibid.) This basic problem drives three questions which, while they can be distinguished from each other, cannot be separate: Who is this self-revealing God? Following Scripture, this question cannot be separated from the second: “How does it come about, how is it actual, that this God reveals Himself? Nor can it be separated from the third question: What is the result? What does this event do to the man to whom it happens? Conversely the second and third questions cannot possibly be separated from the first. (I/1/295-296) The answer to any one of these is essentially an answer to the other two. “The first we have to realise is that this subject, God, the Revealer, is identical with His act in revelation and also identical with its effect.”(ibid.) This means that the doctrine of revelation must begin with the doctrine of the triune God.
In an excursus, Barth clarifies his thinking which he expressed in “the first edition of this book” (Probably Unterricht in Der Christlichen Religion, vol. 1 (1924-1945) p. 127), and which was glibly criticized by Theodore Siegfried in 1930, that Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity might be derived from the revelation of some other supposed god, “even on the statement, ‘I show myself.'” Barth’s sensitivity is shown in later
his dismissal as of Siegfried’s criticism as “cheap” in the excursus on pages (I/1/299-300). He builds his case for his positive assertions carefully.
1. The Bible certainly tell us (or: tell us plainly, Die Bibel sagt uns freilich auch) who the God is whom it attests as self-revealing.
2. “This God will and can make Himself manifest in no other way than in the That and the How of this revelation. He is completely Himself in this That and How.” (I/1/297)
3. “The question who God is in His revelation is to be answered thirdly with a reference to the [humans] who receive the revelation, with a reference to what the Revealer wills and does with them . . . to what His being revealed thus signifies for them.” ((I/1/298). Revelation is always a history (or narrative) between God and certain humans.
These closely interwoven questions bring us close to the problem of the doctrine of the Trinity.” (ibid.). The significance of these three interwoven questions become decisive in two additional questions.
4. God Himself is not just Himself. He is also His self-revealing. “This predicate is in every way identical with God Himself.” (I/1/299). “Ir is God Himself” who “is the revealing God and the event of revelation and its effect upon [a human].” (ibid.)
5. The Bible never even attempts “to dissolve the unity of the self-revealing God, His revelation, and His being revealed” into a union (or singularity, Einerleiheit) towards any synthetic, fourth true reality. The distinctions are always maintained. The “Angel of Yahweh” in Hebrew Scripture is both identical and not identical with Yahweh Himself. There remains an “unimpaired differentiation with Himself [of] his threefold mode of being.” (ibid.)
By observing both the unity and differentiation os God as biblicaly attested in His revelation, we are brought to the problem of the doctrine of the Trinity. And “in putting the doctrine of the Trinity at the ehad of all dogmatics,” Barth is “adopting a very isolated position from the standpoint of dogmatic history.” (I/1/300). (He notes, however, that Peter Lombard’s Sententiae and St. Bonaventure’s Breviloquium took this same isolated position.)
The far more common theological design is to place first the doctrine of the Holy Scripture (in Reformation theologies, especially Calvin), or the teaching office (in Roman Catholic dogmatics), or a demonstration of the reality and truth of religion (in modernist dogmatics) as the principle by which all that follows can be known (what Barth calls principium cognoscendi).
Barth offers a bracing critique of the long-running tradition of discussing the basis for making doctrinal claims (whether that be Scripture, or the teaching office, or a philosophy of religion) before making the claim itself. “What we are trying to bring to practical recognition by putting it first” is “whether what is in every respect the very important term “God”is used in Church proclamation” in a way faithful to the Scriptural witness. (I/1/301) “The doctrine of the Trinity is what basically distinguishes the Christian doctrine of God as Christian, and therefore what already distinguishes the Christian concept of revelation as Christian, in contrast to all other possible doctrines of God or concepts of revelation.”(ibid.) This decision will be repeated at every stage in the development of Barth’s dogmatics, but from this first point.
The content of the doctrine of the Trinity must be controlling for the whole of dogmatics, not just its formal position in a place of prominence. What God does and effects is corollary to the united co-equal answers to the first three questions (as above). “The problem of the three answers to these questions—answers which are like and yet different, different and yet like—is the problem of the doctrine of the Trinity. In the first instance the problem of revelation stands or falls with this problem.” (I/1/303)