Concluding Excursus to 1. The Word of God as Preached: Apostolic Succession
Barth’s concluding excursus to the first section of §4 is really an article in its own right, and deserves careful reading.
Barth’s point of departure if Adolf von Harnack’s essay Christus praesens–Vicarius Christi, published in 1927. (For full citation see I/1/106.) Barth not only criticizes von Harnack, but offers an illuminating evangelical critique of the “traditional” (that is, Tridentine–Vatican 1) Roman Catholic position regarding doctrinal change and the concept of Church potestas.
This critique is raised by the issue of succession to Christ, traditionally referred to as the vicariate, and in particular by Barth’s concluding phrase of §4:1, “The Word of God preached means in this fourth and innermost circle man’s talk about God in which and through which God speaks about Himself.”(I/1/95) So who speaks now? Hence the issue of succession of vicariate, and the potestas or power of the Church to speak: which human in particular has the character or marks to do this?
Barth begins by drawing a long chain of patristic and 16th-century reflection, beginning with Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, and Augustine, and then Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin, with attention to preaching as “the familiar singling out of the bishop’s office as first espoused especially by Ignatius of Antioch” (I/1/97), and Barth (in contrast with von Harnack) takes no exception to the though of the vicariate or succession in itself. The “evangelical” dissent to Roman Catholic dogmatics is less foundational: “The difference between Roman Catholic dogmatics and ourselves, which, of course, we must always keep in view, cannot refer to the fact of this vicariate or succession, but only to its manner. ” (ibid.). Barth identifies three questions:
- “How does a man become vicarius Christi and successor Petri?“
- “How does this vicariate or succession arise?”
- “In what consists this vicariate or succession?” (ibid.)
Barth summarizes the Roman Catholic (Vatican 1) position: a human “does so through his place at the bottom of a list of bishops that goes back without a break to an apostle, finally to Peter, and last of all to Christ as the Founder of the Church”(ibid.) and “it consists in a character which by ordination a bishop or priest receives for life in addition to his humanity. We ask how there can be a character for life if ordination can relate only to the official acts of the person ordained and even in respect of these acts cannot try to mean more than the proclamation of a promise?” (ibid.) The office “consists in the permanent authority of the teaching office to establish and proclaim irreformable definitions in matters of faith and morals. We ask how far the exercise of this permanent authority of a human court to speak irreformably can still be understood as service of God. How far does one have here only a representation and not rather a supplanting of Christ?” (ibid.)
Barth realized that the traditional Roman Catholic doctrine “is a genuinely significant attempt to come to terms with the problem of real proclamation.” (ibid.) Barth locates the real difference between evangelical and Roman Catholic dogmatics in the concept of person: “a personal lordship (i.e. of Christ) must be a free lordship. A personal presence must be such that along with it there is a possibility of absence. A personal gift must be faced with the possibility of its refusal. And precisely this limitation of Church powers by the Person of Christ must prove the Church to be the true Church, serving Christ. “But this limitation is ruled out by the doctrines of historical succession, indelible character, and the possibility of irreformable definitions. Hence we must reject these doctrines.” (I/1/98)
After a long chain of references to Reformers and reformation documents, Barth concludes:
Is Christ’s action, real proclamation, the Word of God preached, tied to the ecclesiastical office and consequently to a human act, or conversely, as one might conclude from this oretn33, are the office and act tied to the action of Christ, to the actualising of proclamation by God, to the Word of God preached? From the standpoint of our theses this question is the puzzling cleft which has cut right across the church during the last 400 years. (I/1/99).
Barth’s treatment of the question of succession to Christ reveals his “personalism,” his enduring recourse to the discourse of the person of Christ: a real, free, and historical agency initiated by God, and freely gracious to humans (freely in the sense that it does not depend upon human initiative or response). Elsewhere Barth’s discourse cuts equally against a variety of “conservative evangelical” teaching which stresses the automatic authenticity of proclamation based upon a particular definition of inerrant, infallible Scripture. The problem of the free Word of God both proclaimed by humans and at the sole initiative of God’s grace, viewed through Barth’s personalist discourse, is a consistent theme throughout the Church Dogmatics.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, October 2019