I approach Barth’s Church Dogmatics from the perspective of a historian of Christianity rather than as a trained systematic theologian, or Reformed-tradition pastor. My academic training is as a church historian. While I respect theologians (at least thoughtful ones!), I am not driven by the urge to systematize that seems to motivate so many systematic theologians. The history of Christianity is, to paraphrase Barth, a history of the problems that the Church has made for itself. Church historians are sometimes the pagans in the temple of ecclesiastical scholarship: they study the history of the whole church, especially those who act and speak outside of the confines of the academy. They also teach on behalf of the church, studying wider history as one example of communities of historical inquiry. (Other such communities are military historians, legal historians, historians of science –all committed to service to particular wider communities of inquiry, action, or common interest.). Church historians are obliged in the holy spirit (or Holy Spirit) of truth to attend to all the seamy aspects of Christian history, as well as the gracious.
I am neither a systematic nor historical theologian. Historical theologians try to retrieve the insights of a thinker or writer in the past with an eye towards advocating a theological point of view or procedure in the present. Barth was an historical theologian when he studied St. Anselm so carefully. By contrast, a church historian would study St. Anselm in his context as one voice (an interesting voice!) of 11th-century Europe. For church historians, Barth is still too recent to be properly historical (by the standards of most church history, which has a very old set of sources and disciplinary history). Historically speaking, the jury on Barth hasn’t even convened.
On the other hand, Barth’s own historical insights, sprinkled throughout the Church Dogmatics, are frequently interesting or even provocative, but hardly settle once-for-all historical inquiry and debate. I cannot regard Barth’s own insights about historical figures (St. Anselm, for example) as conversation-stopping. Anselmian studies will go on, with majority voice really going to historians such as Richard Southern.
In the past decade, the context for reading Barth and “Neo-orthodox” Protestant theologians has changed significantly. A generation ago it was fashionable to cite Dietrich Bonhoeffer‘s insight that the secular world was a “world come of age,” that a 20th-century secular human need for God could not now be assumed. While Bonhoeffer did not address a global “future of religion,” occupied as he surely was with the nadir of Germany, often implicit when citing him was an assumption that the future of the globe belonged to secular, democratic culture, a kind of “end of history” (to cite a fashionable, empty phrase by Francis Fukuyama). The rise of chauvinistic nationalism, so filled with fear and hate, has certainly begged the question whether the world is ever really “come of age.” The rise of the “nones” (those who claim no religious background whatsoever) is less evidence of “coming of age” than of the bankruptcy of versions of Christianity which justify and celebrate executive power (such as the “court Evangelicals”).
With all respect to the martyred Bonhoeffer, the past decade has witnessed emphatically that the world has not come of age. If anything, the worst excesses of religious passion seem ascendant, and from all quarters: Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, and especially nationalist, each in several historical varieties. Barth’s critique of religion in CD 1/2/282-302 is particularly barbed and particularly relevant, and for that reason I jumped ahead to it in my reading.
I write this blog as a contemporary North American Protestant Christian deeply aware that some other Christians exhibit no concern at all for reasonable and humble self-scrutiny regarding their motives, purposes, and actions. Barth provides a devastating critique of Christian arrogance in all its historical forms. In North America this critique was often associated with Reinhold Niebuhr. Barth’s own critique goes much further.
Institutionally, I write from the professional, academic vantage point of a Protestant librarian in a lay-led Roman Catholic university. Catholic higher education is not my native habitat, and I have learned much about it since I arrived at Sacred Heart University in 2006. I am constantly reminded assumptions and habits which I learned in Protestant institutions are not shared in my current professional domicile. While I deeply respect my Catholic colleagues here, I am also aware that the retired incumbent of the See of Rome (Joseph Ratzinger) regularly has reminded me of every reason I ever had to remain Protestant. (The current Bishop of Rome has attempted to soften such an impact.) I respect his point of view as serious and well-argued, but I find I must still dissent from his teaching for the only worthwhile theological reason: for the sake of the Gospel.
I suspect that Karl Barth and Joseph Ratzinger would have had a spirited conversation as intellectual equals. Barth would never have dismissed Ratzinger’s point of view. He would have taken it very seriously, disagreed vehemently, and (in poker terms) raised him one. I expect that Barth’s conversation with Jorge Mario Bergoglio would have been equally spirited but more irenic.
Barth probably would not have anticipate the moral bankruptcy that the seemingly bottomless scandal of sexually and emotionally abusive clergy has posed for the Roman Catholic Church in particular –though no Christian group is exempt, in particular my own Episcopal Church. Such bankruptcy has revealed again the need for reform “root and branch” reminiscent of the 16th century. Barth, seeking to recovery real Reformation theology in the chastened context of the 20th century, would surely have understood the need for fundamental reform and even replacement.
My experience of some of Barth’s readers is that they find in Barth the means to address anxieties evoked by previous experience in Evangelical Protestantism. I am emphatically not from a North American evangelical background of any flavor –I am not concerned whether Barth’s view of Scripture is sufficiently “high.” My concern is proclamation in the Church as an event, an encounter –a community not by any means equivalent neither to Josef Ratzinger’s and Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s organization, Evangelical Protestantism, nor the World Council of Churches, either.