The Author’s Introduction
Like many author’s forewards, Barth’s foreward to I/1, written in 1932, plunges the reader into controversies in a now-remote world with little explanation or historical context.
Unexplained but in the background– is Barth’s controversial career as a Swiss Reformed pastor in Safenwil (a small in Kanton Aargau, roughly between Zürich and Berne) 1911-1921, and professor at Göttingen (1921-1925), Münster (1925-1930), and Bonn (1930-1935). In Safenwil he was shocked by the low pay and working conditions of his parishioners, and was attracted to religious Socialism, but the outbreak of the Great War and the full support given by his teacher Adolf von Harnack (and others) forced him to the conclusion that the liberal Protestant theology in which he had taught left him with nothing to say about ethics and hope.
In 1919 his new thinking and re-reading of Scripture resulted in his publication of a commentary on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. His critical insight was the otherness of God, the revelation which in Jesus Christ ruled out any alliance or continuity of God’s grace with human capabilities or achievements. Further work in 1920 (a lecture “Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas”) and a greatly re-written, extended, and intensified second edition of his seminal Römerbrief (1922) subsequently divided the theological world into supporters and detractors.
One has to wonder whether Barth in 1932 could begin to imagine how long Church Dogmatics would become!
In the 1920s Barth became identified with a coalition of writers called “dialectical theology” which included diverse figures who frequently disagreed (and relished their disagreements!). This variety of discourse sought to relate Christian theology to emerging or newly-rediscovered existentialist writers such as Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger. During the 1920s Barth wrote a prolegomenon (1927) to dogmatic theology he called Christian Dogmatics in Outline: The Doctrine of the Word of God: A Prolegomenon to Christian Dogmatics (Christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf, Bd. 1: Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes; Prolegomena zur christlichen Dogmatik), but when he realized that it was too grounded in existentialist philosophy, he sought to formulate a theology that would not depend upon anthropology, philosophy, or other extrinsic sources.
An additional source for his changing thinking sprang from his study (1931) of St. Anselm, Fides quaerens intellectum. St. Anselm, an 11th century monk and Archbishop of Canterbury, sought to make the Christian articles of faith intelligible through reason, thoroughly analyzing their terms, an extension and intensification of the creed. Anselm sought to clarify, measure, and comprehend the appropriateness of Christian language. Notoriously difficult to understand, St. Anselm’s texts became Barth’s touchstone for a theology which sought to measure its concepts by its own criteria and not criteria borrowed from philosophy.
In the author’s foreword to to CD I/1 Barth is responding to his changed situation and changing mind. This author’s foreword is available in translation only in the original 1936 translation (preface date 1934) by G. T. Thomson that was later superseded in the 1950s. This translation is, alas, not included in the Study Edition published beginning in 2010. (It is included in the online Digital Karl Barth Library published by Alexander Street Press in association with Theologischer Verlag Zürich and Princeton Theological Seminary.)
In that original foreword (p. xiii-xiv) to I/1 Barth is not only concerned to explicate that his mind has changed, and how it has changed (turning to dogmatics as a discipline bound to the Church, not to a free-standing Christianity apart from the Church), but what caused the change. In the early 20th century there was a wider gulf between Roman Catholic and Protestant theologies than now (2008), and St. Anselm was clearly a Catholic source. Hence Barth’s comment that he did not believe dogmatics began in 1517 (a reference to Luther), and his simultaneous defense of his writing as remaining officially non-Catholic, but catholic in a lower-case sense of the term.
Barth specifically identifies the so-called natural knowledge of God, whether in the Schleiermacher–Ritchsl-Herrmann line, or the Roman Catholic line, as “the plain destruction of Protestant theology and the Protestant Church,” [p. xiii] and as grounded in what he calls the analogia entis or analogy of being –that God and creation are ontologically analogous and that this ontological similarity enables some natural apprehension of God. Barth’s critique of the analogia entis is many-sided and will reappear later in I/I and the whole of CD –there will be much more to say.
Barth’s foreword alludes to another developing conflict, the rise of Fascism in Europe and in particular National Socialism in Germany. On pages x-xi Barth specifically ties the charge of his “Catholicizing” to the charge of fideism, the historical inaccuracies a foot (fides qua versus fides quae), and the “constantly increasing confusion, tedium and irrelevance of modern Protestantism” [p. xiv] which has led in the end “preachers and adherents have finally learned to discover deep religious significance in the intoxication of Nordic blood and their political Führer?” Barth bound himself to an evangelical (protestant) dogmatics set upon its own authority, proceeding upon its own agenda, as a weighty and more solid contribution to the questions of his time, “tasks as that of German liberation.” (p. xvi)
Finally he announces his highly ambitious plan in five large parts, for which he “must count upon many years.” He asked his readers to believe, on the basis of these reflections, “that I do at least know what I am after.” (p. xvii)
One has to wonder whether Barth himself, in 1932 age 46, healthy, ambitious, and at the top of his game, could begin to imagine how long Church Dogmatics would become!
[rev. and page numbers updated Oct. 2019]