1. The Need for Dogmatic Prolegomena
This entire section again places the reader in the distant context of Barth’s change of mind from the so-called Göttingen Dogmatics to this revised project Die kirchliche Dogmatik. In this section, Barth’s rejection both of Roman Catholic theology and Protestant Modern theology become very sharp.
The entire section is divided into two sections: 1) The need for dogmatic prolegomena; and 2) The possibility of dogmatic prolegomena –both referring to “the introductory part of Dogmatics, in which our concern is to understand its particular way of knowledge” (I/1/25)
Barth recognizes that prolegomena are only relatively necessary insofar as it may be felt necessary to explain a particular path to knowledge. He takes what the ancients (Church fathers + medieval writers + the “old” Protestant theology?) terms praecognita Theologiae (the fore-known things of Theology) and recognizes that it may not be needed on sound intellectual grounds and not merely naiveté: but “we are now forbidden to take up the main content of dogmatics without express and explicit discussion of the problem of the way of knowledge.” (I/1/26).
Why? Barth notes, here it is usual to point to intellectual changes: the wave of “paganism” threatening the Church and theology, or “radicalism … with its total denial of revelation as such.”(ibid.) The theologian now lives in an “altered situation” which requires existential theology, etc. (I/1/28) This requires a “point of connection for the divine message in [humans], and with this connecting point “In connexion with this point of contact it has “to be shown how by the Word of God human reason is partly disclosed to be the source of error which is hostile to life, and partly fulfilled in its own incomplete searching.” (I/1/208, referring to Emil Brunner in several places). Barth rejects this commonplace on three grounds:
- “because there is no theological foundation for the assumed difference between our own and earlier times. Has there ever been an age in which theology has not basically confronted a radical negation of the revelation believed in the Church?” (ibid.)
- because it detracts from the essential nature of dogmatics, in which “the Church has to measure its talk about God by the standard of its own being, i.e., of divine revelation.? Its talk about God, however, is that of the intrinsically godless reason of man which is inimical to belief. At every point, therefore, dogmatics is – a struggle between this reason of man and the revelation believed in the Church.” (I/1/28-29) The bearings of the discussion must be set upon the utterance (Spruch) of revelation, not the counter-utterance (Widerspruch) of reason –and to measure the Church’s language to show a “point of connection” is to substitute reflection upon divine revelation with reflection upon human knowing, to ask whether revelation is possible, rather than, what is a human’s real knowledge of divine revelation? “It can only take this form: What is true human knowledge of divine revelation?—on the assumption that revelation itself creates of itself the necessary point of contact in man.” (ibid.)
- Further, Barth rejects the commonplace of the modern “altered situation” because it virtually guarantees that theology will lose sight of its real objective. Here one encounters for the first time in Church Dogmatics Barth’s famous refusal to engage in apologetics: “Theological thinking which by the grace of God is truly responsible and relevant, and stands in true connexion with contemporary society, will even to-day show itself to be such by not allowing itself to be drawn into discussion of its basis, of the question of the existence of God or of revelation.” (I/1/30) The best defense is a great offense, in sports terms. “There has never been any effective apologetics or polemics of faith against unbelief except that which is not deliberately planned, which cannot possibly be planned, which simply happens as God Himself acknowledges the witness of faith.(ibid.) Barth gives three further reasons for the alleged irresponsibility of apologetics:
- “In such apologetics faith must clearly take unbelief seriously. Hence it cannot take itself with full seriousness. Secretly or openly, therefore, it ceases to be faith. What unbelief expects of faith is quite simply that it should be an event. It is not in our hands to produce this event.” (ibid.)
- “In all independently ventured apologetics and polemics there may be discerned the opinion that dogmatics has done its work.”(ibid.)
- Such an “independent eristics at least runs the risk that once its task is completed dogmatics will think that its conflict with unbelief has been brought to an end” (ibid.)
By contast, “the necessity of dogmatic prolegomena, i.e., of an explicit account of the particular way to be taken in dogmatics, must be an inner necessity grounded in the matter itself.” (I/1/31) “Faith does not stand only, or even in the first and most important sense, in conflict with unbelief. It stands in conflict with itself, i.e., with a form or forms of faith in which it recognises itself in respect of form but not of content.”(ibid.) This leads Barth on to a discussion of heresy, a “paradox” of theology.
Barth’s definition of heresy (“paradoxical”) is carefully elliptical:
By heresy we understand a form of Christian faith which we cannot deny to be a form of Christian faith from the formal standpoint, i.e., in so far as it, too, relates to Jesus Christ, to His Church, to baptism, Holy Scripture and the common Christian creeds, but in respect of which we cannot really understand what we are about when we recognise it as such, since we can understand its content, its interpretation of these common presuppositions, only as a contradiction of faith.. (I/1/32)
Note the concessive character of this definition: “we cannot deny” something recognizable as Christian faith” but we are not in the position to understand what we are doing when we do acknowledge it as such a form. It contains an interpretation of “these common presuppositions” (presumably, the dogmatic prolegomena discussed in this section) which “we” (Barth) can only regard as a contradiction of faith. In other words, heresy will be in fact self-contradictory, despite its appearance as a form of Christian faith, precisely because of the presuppositions its shares with non-heresy, i.e. orthodoxy.
This is less than completely clear –either in Barth’s text, or in my partial and doubtless errant interpretation.
Barth explains that “it is a matter of engagement from different angles with the thing itself,” i.e. the correct interpretation of faith. (I/1/33) “In true encounter with heresy faith is plunged into conflict with itself, because, so long and so far as it is not free of heresy, so long and so far as heresy affects it, so long and so far as it must accept responsibtity in relation to it, it cannot allow even the voice of unbelief which it thinks it hears in heresy to cause it to treat it as not at least also faith but simply as unbelief” (ibid.) because this possibility is a possibility within the Church itself. XXXThis gets clearer when Barth gets down to specifics: he is going after the fact of Roman Catholicism on the one hand, and the fact of pietistic-rationalistic Modernism on the other. “But heresies force us to see clearly to what extent, in what sense and with what inner foundation we stand on the one side and not the other, and thus understand revelation, not in Roman Catholic or Modernist terms, but in Evangelical terms.” –i.e., in a classically Protestant sense, deriving from the 16th-century Reformers (I/1/34)
Thus implicit in Barth’s understanding of the need for dogmatic prolegomena is an understanding of religious history which is in fact arguable. He writes in an excursus that “conflict with Jews, pagans and atheists only for the most part incidentally, and never with anything like the same emphasis or zeal as it did with heretics.” (I/1/32) But this certainly ignores the Crusades –with its heavy persecution of Rhineland Jewry– as well as later 16th- and 17th-century persecutions which gave rise to the era of modern toleration through eventual repulsion against the bloodletting. Barth dismisses this as “the by no means laudable nor even necessary mutual abuse or even burnings of those past days” and yet its relevance in 2008 (and 2019!) is certainly striking.(ibid.)–as was this 1932 passage, written on the cusp of Nazi brutality and the Shoah. The age of blood, oppression, and the essential perversion of religions seems to have returned.
On the one hand, Barth has to take seriously the positions with which he passionately disagrees –heresies to him, a choosing (haeresis) related to a Biblical term– but on the other hand he has to take seriously the intervening centuries in which Christianity (to say the least) lost cachet and moral authority through its own gruesome and costly conflicts. And always implicit in the wings is a heresy he faced in Europe: the rise of Fascism and the cult of the Führer. But in 1931 (when this section was written) that was not yet fully ascendant. The moral turpitude of 21st century “court evangelicals” bears witness to his essential point: at the root of all these historical horrors lies a huge and costly theological mistake.
Rev. and page numbers updated Oct. 2019