2. Dogmatics and Church Proclamation
This section does not hold Barth’s strongest writing. Barth’s own structure gives indirect support to this appraisal in §7,3 “The Problem of Dogmatic Prolegomena” (I/1/287-292), nearly at the center of I/1. There Barth summarizes his broad argument undertaken in §1–§7 –but never even implicitly refers to §3 at all!
Barth makes his basic claim straightaway in this section.
The claim with which church proclamation steps forward and the expectation with which it is surrounded should not mislead us; it is always and always will be man’s word. It is also something more than this and quite different. When and where it pleases God, it is God’s own Word. Upon the promise of this divine good-pleasure it is ventured in obedience. On this promise depend the claim and the expectation. But proclamation both as preaching and sacrament does not cease to be representation, human service.( I/1/71-72)
Barth then goes on, briefly, to assert the freedom of proclamation, including the pointed implication, ” Church proclamation, as regards its content, cannot let itself be questioned as to whether it is in harmony with the distinctive features and interests of a race, people, nation, or state” (I/1/72) –this in the face of growing Nazi propaganda ca. 1930. Instead the church’s human word is charged with a real responsibility, “Its real responsibility arises out of its intention to be proclamation of the Word of God..” (ibid.)
In the face of Hitler’s growing insistence upon the oppression of the German people, and with it the German churches, Barth insists “Thus it is precisely in terms of its origin and basis, of the being of the Church, that Church proclamation, and with it the Church itself, is assailed and called in question.” (I/1/81) . This origin and basis has previously been proclaimed as the person of Jesus Christ.
In sum, “the Church can neither question its proclamation absolutely nor correct it absolutely . . . On its human work it can only do again a human work of criticising and correcting.” (I/1/75-76) This cuts squarely against Vatican I’s claim for the Church’s teaching office and in the roman Pope “most particularly, in definienda doctrina de fide vel moribus” (Excursus, I/1/75.)
On the other hand, “One cannot and should not expect to hear the content of proclamation from dogmatics.” (I/1/79) The Proclamation of the Word “must be found each time in the middle space between the particular text in the context of the whole Bible and the particular situation of the changing moment..” (ibid.) . In an excursus Barth notes (almost with a smile):
It is a familiar and perhaps unavoidable beginner’s mistake of students and assistants, when preaching, to think that they can and should confidently take the content of their preaching from their treasured college notebooks and textbooks of dogmatics. On the other hand, older preachers are usually far too confident in removing themselves from the jurisdiction of this critical authority. (ibid.)
In conclusion, “But the normal and central factum on which dogmatics focuses will always be quite simply the Church’s Sunday sermon of yesterday and to-morrow. The Church stands or falls with this function enjoined upon it. It has every cause to take dogmatic work very seriously as the criticism and correction of this its decisive function..” (I/1/81)
Consequently: 1) “Dogmatics is required because proclamation is a fallible human work.” (I/1/82); 2) “Dogmatics serves Church proclamation” (I/1/83); 3) “Dogmatics serves Church proclamation.” (I/1/85). “what dogmatics has to give does not consist of contents but of guidelines, directions, insights, principles and limits for correct speech by human estimate.” (I/1/86).
Interwoven with this serious (if brief) content is a series of asides which certainly illustrate Barth’s human limitations –perhaps an indirect historical support for his claim that dogmatics, too, is simply a human work.
For example, in an excursus I/1/73 Barth writes:
The Ad fontes! of the Humanists at the beginning of the 16th century was in itself simply a matter of a historicism which is easily seen through theologically and is definitely to be rejected. The discovery of the free creative individual which invaded every sphere with increasing force from the middle of the same century was intrinsically no more than a bit of reviving paganism. The rationality with which the 18th century thought it could master the problems of life better than the Church was sufficiently sharply distinct to be an obvious theological aberration.
This is in short amazingly arrogant. Barth’s highly debatable assertion —which he never offers to support— that the early modern humanists’ turn to the sources was a matter of “historicism” mis-reads territory shared alike by humanists and Protestants –and no less than Calvin himself, as shown by William J. Bouwsma. While some humanists grew to love “a bit of reviving paganism,” the mainstream of humanists tended to support Christian writers such as Erasmus, Melanchthon, Peter Vermigli, and Sir Thomas More when theological strife arose. In the 18th century, one of the mainsprings of the turn to a secular view of reason, “the rationality with which the 18th century thought it could master the problems of life better than the Church” was the amazingly destructive wars of religion in the 17th century, which badly damaged the credibility of all Church parties, Catholic and Protestant. But Barth goes on:
The new Humanism which is preached in America to-day, and which has some prospects of becoming the world-view of the immediate future, betrays already by its utter fatuousness that it is in a very inferior position vis-à-vis the Church. Nor can one see in the Asiatic crudities of Bolshevic ideology a rival which inwardly is even remotely a match for the Church’s proclamation. (ibid.)
These mere assertions –with no supporting argument– suggest that Barth’s prickliness had a source in some intellectual anxiety over the coherence of positions with which he disagreed. Instead of arguing with them, he simply dismisses them with the arrogance which at one point sometimes characterized too much German theology. How little Barth actually knew about America in 1930! How little did he consider the role played by the memory of European persecutions and judicial murders in the memories of American religious communities –even those communities such as New England Protestants who freely practiced judicial murder when the opportunity came in the 17th century. The European snort about the “Asiatic crudities” of Bolshevism –an entirely European movement, brought to fruition on Russian European soil, betrays indeed how uncharmingly German-centered Barth’s theological world really was in 1930. That would eventually change, but not without world-wide conflict and catastrophe.
The point of my objections here is not to tear Barth down, but to humanize him and put him in the context of intellectually (sometimes) arrogant, immodestly self-assured German theological scholars of the first half of the 20th century. What is amazing is not that he shared it in his first 40 years, but that in his later life he overcame much of the intellectual hubris characteristic of that background.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, October 2019