Barth’s text presents several challenges to contemporary readers, noted elsewhere. This entry concerns the intellectual organization of Church Dogmatics. Another document here describes how Barth’s pages are organized.
Church Dogmatics was intended to be presented in five major parts. The fifth and last part was never written; a famous joke about both German grammar and Barth’s style goes that Barth “died before he got to the verb.”
The four completed parts are:
- The Doctrine of the Word of God
- The Doctrine of God
- The Doctrine of Creation
- The Doctrine of Reconciliation
- [The Doctrine of Redemption, unfinished]
Within each of of these parts (designated with an upper-case Roman numeral) are part-volumes 1, 2, etc. Ordinarily citations are thus formatted: I/2/103, indicating Part I, volume 2, page 103.
Cutting against this very neat organization, however, Barth also numbered sections in each volume sequentially as § sections. In addition, he indicated large “chapter” numbers in each volume sequentially –for example, Church Dogmatics II.2 (The Doctrine of God) opens with “Chapter VII: The Election of God,” and §32, “The Problem of the Correct Doctrine of the Election of Grace.”
Pages —Deo gratias!— are numbered sequentially in each
volume. Thus a citation II/2/145 refers to the part II (“The Doctrine of God”),
the first page of Chapter VII (“The Election of
God), §33 (“The Election of Jesus Christ”), subsection 2 (“The
Eternal Will of God in Jesus Christ”).
The page citation II/2/145 is helpful shorthand but in no sense indicates where
in Barth’s extended argument the citation occurs.
In addition, Barth’s part, chapter, section, and subsection titles –see the example just above– often seem unusually recursive. This recursive quality is part and parcel of Barth’s prose style, which he employed for reasons which become clear as his argument proceeds. Again and again he attempts to delimit sharply what humans can properly (or faithfully) say or claim regarding the Word of God, and in what manner dogmatics (die Dogmatik) may be regarded as a discipline (Wissenschaft) in a university setting. My claim here can only be shown (rather than merely asserted) as Barth’s argument proceeds. Why Barth chose this organization, at first blush both rigid, recursive, and elusive, is best left for another essay.
In short, he was responding in the
organization of his thinking to classical Reformed
thinkers following the examples of John Calvin’s mature Institutio Christianae
religionis (Institute of the Christian Religion —institutio in
16th-century Europe meant a principle or element of instruction). Barth was
also responding to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s comprehensive Der
christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche.
Calvin and Schleiermacher –emblematic for Karl Barth of the “older theology”
and “modern liberal Protestantism” respectively– became the peers
Barth sought to address, as well as –especially in Barth’s the later volumes–
the Catholic heritage of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologica.