Category Archives: Church Dogmatics

Christ’s baptism, Christ’s confession

Posted by on January 8, 2012 1 comment

A fitting reflection I think, for this Sunday, the Baptism of the Lord:

When He had Himself baptised with water by John, Jesus confessed both God and [humankind]. A better way of putting it is that because He confessed God, the God whose will was soon to be done on earth as it is in heaven, therefore He confessed [humankind], the [humans] who are in view in this doing of God’s will. Because He is committed unreservedly to subordination to God, therefore He is committed unreservedly to solidarity with [humankind]. He who as God’s Son was very different from all [people], being one with the Father who sent Him, and therefore Himself God, negated this difference, this distance, this strangeness between Himself and others, even to the last remnant. He became wholly and utterly one of them, not in an act of secret or even public condescension, like a king for a change donning a beggar’s rags and mingling with the crowd, but by belonging to them in every way, by being no more and no less than one of them, by having no point of reference except to them. He became one of them, not in order to renounce full fellowship with them when the game was over, like the king exchanging again the beggar’s rags for his kingly robes, not in order to leave again the table where He had seated Himself with publicans and sinners , and to find himself a better place, but in order to be one of them definitively as well as originally, unashamed to call them brethren to all eternity because He was their Brother from all eternity (Heb. 2:11), a veritable King in this true form of His, and at His place of honour. With the men of His people, then, He received the Word of God which came to John and to which John bore witness. With them He looked forward to the intimated new act of God which would change all things. With them He looked forward to the establishment of God’s kingdom, the threatened judgment, the remission and taking away of their sins. With them He obeyed the call for conversion issued to his people. With all the rest He had Himself baptised with water. With them He thus confessed His sins. His sins? If we do not say this, we question and even deny the totality of His self-giving to [humankind], and therewith the totality of His self-giving to God. We say that He had Himself baptised with the rest only improperly, contrary to the meaning of John’s preaching and baptism, in a demonstration which had neither truth nor necessity for Him. We say at root that this was just a theatrical show. But it was not a theatrical show. The seriousness with which others, frightened before God and setting their hope in Him alone, confessed their sins, is infinitely surpassed hereby the divine earnestness with which this One, when faced by the sins of all others, their confusions and corruptions, their big and little acts of ungodliness, did not let these sins be theirs, did not regard, bewail or judge them from a distance with tacit or open accusation, did not simply characterise them as sins by His own Otherness, but as the Son of His Father, elected and ordained from all eternity to be the Brother of these fatal brethren, caused them to be His own sins, confessed them as such, and therewith confessed that He was baptised in prospect of God’s kingdom, judgment and forgiveness. No one who came to the Jordan was as laden and afflicted as He. No one was as needy. No one was so utterly human, because so wholly fellow-human. No one confessed his sins so sincerely, so truly as his own, without side-glances at others. He stands alone in this, He who was elected and ordained from all eternity to partake of the sin of all in His own person, to bear its shame and curse in the place of all, to be the man responsible for all, and as such, wholly theirs, to live and act and suffer. This is what Jesus began to do when He had Himself baptised by John with all the others. This was the opening of His history as the salvation history of all the others.

~Karl Barth, CD IV/4, 58-59.

Barth and the primacy of the family

Posted by on April 6, 2011 13 comments

Thanks to Melissa for sending this gem from Karl Barth my way:

If along the third main line of the texts in question we have to do with the overcoming, proclaimed with the incursion of the kingdom of God, of the false separation between man and man revealed in the friend-foe relationship and concretely expressing itself in the exercise of force, along a fourth line we have, conversely, the dissolution of self-evident attachments between man and man. It is a matter of what in popular usage, although not in that of the Bible, is usually described as the family. The relationships between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, etc., are not questioned as such. Man would not be man if he did not stand in these relationships. What is questioned is the impulsive intensity with which he allows himself to be enfolded by, and thinks that he himself should enfold, those who stand to him in these relationships. What is questioned is his self-sufficiency in the warmth of these relationships, the resolving of their problems and the sphere of their joys and sorrows. What is questioned is his imprisonment in them, in which he is no less a captive than in other respects he may be to possessions or fame. The message of liberation comes to him in this captivity to the clan. Thus the excuse of the invited guest: ” I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come ” (Lk. 14:20), is seen to be on exactly the same level as those of others who had bought land or oxen which claimed their prior interest. And in the same connection Jesus gives the remarkable reply to the man who was ready to be a disciple but first wanted to bury his father: ” Let the dead bury their dead but go thou and preach the kingdom of God ” (Lk. 9:59f.). To the same series belong all the provocative sayings of Jesus about the leaving (apheinai), dividing (dichazein), disuniting (diamerizein) and even hating (misein) which are involved in the discipleship of Jesus – not destroying the relationships as such, but certainly dissolving the connections which continually arise and obtain in them. According to Mk, 10:29 we have not only to leave house and lands but even brother or sister, mother or father or children (the ” or ” shows us that we are dealing with individual cases), for His sake and for the sake of the Gospel. Jesus also warns us against the view that He has come to bring peace on earth (Mt. 10:34f.). He has not come to bring peace, but a sword. And if a man loves father or mother, son or daughter, more than Him, he is not worthy of Him. Or, according to the parallel passage in Lk. 12:52 : ” For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three.” The strangest possible expression is used in Lk. 14:26 : ” If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Hate ? It is not the persons that are to be hated, for why should they be excluded from the command to love our neighbors ? It is the hold which these persons have and by which they themselves are also gripped. It is the concentration of neighborly love on these persons, which really means its denial. It is the indolent peace of a clannish warmth in relation to these persons, with its necessary implication of cold war against all others. The coming of the kingdom of God means an end of the absolute of family no less than that of possession and fame. Again, there is no general rule. No new law has been set up in competition with that of the world, which points so powerfully in the opposite direction. But there is proclaimed the freedom of the disciple from the general law as it is given to him, and has to be exercised by him, in a particular situation (by the particular direction which he receives). There can be no doubt that in its fear of the bogy of monasticism Protestantism has very radically ignored this proclamation of Jesus Christ, as also that of other freedoms. To a very large extent it has acted as though Jesus had done the very opposite and proclaimed this attachment – the absolute of family. Can we really imagine a single one of the prophets or apostles in the role of the happy father, or grandfather, or even uncle, as it has found self-evident sanctification in the famous Evangelical parsonage or manse ? They may well have occupied this role. But in the function in which they are seen by us they stand outside these connections. In this respect, too, no one is asked to undertake arbitrary adventures. But again, no one who really regards himself as called by Jesus to discipleship can evade the question whether he might not be asked for inner and outer obedience along these lines. The life of the new creature is something rather different from a healthy and worthy continuation of the old. When the order is given to express this, we must not refuse it an obedience which is no less concrete than the command.

~ Karl Barth, CD IV/2 549-550

 

Church Dogmatics §2 Comments

Posted by on January 7, 2011 1 comment

§2.1 The Necessity of Dogmatic Prolegomena

Summary: Prolegomena is the introductory part of theology that seeks to understand its particular way of knowledge. Prolegomena, thus, is our attempt to speak about how we go about knowing in theology. Why do we need prolegomena? Well, first of all it isn’t something simply forced on us by modernity. Barth rejects the notion that somehow our present age is unique and different than all others that preceded it: “Knowledge of the revelation believed in the Church does not stand or fall with the general religious possibility that is made easier by the ancient view of things and more difficult by the modern” (p. 28). Moreover, this view (i.e. that the modern situation requires theology to offer a sort of justificatory prolegomena that explains how revelation is possible) is to be reject also on the grounds that revelation, as the church confesses it, has occured and it creates its own “point of contact in [hu]man[ity]” (p. 29). We cannot set about looking into the possibility of knowing divine revelation, we can only speak about its actuality. However, speaking in this way of course leaves open the possibility of heresy, that is a genuinely Christian deviations (or seeming deviation) from truth of revelation. This is a possibility that we can never foreclose, and which is in fact essential for the life of the church.

Money Quote: “In this conversation [between faith and heresy] the Church must wrestle with heresy in such  way that it may itself be the Church. And heresy must attack the Church because it is not sufficiently or truly the Church. . . . 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 it must accept responsibility in relation to it, it cannot allow even the the voice of unbelief which it thinks it hears in heresy to cause it to treat as not at least also faith but simply as unbelief. It must understand it as a possibility of faith.” (p. 33)

§2.2 The Possibility of Dogmatic Prolegomena

Summary: Understanding prolegomena as the articulation of the way of knowledge that happens in theology means that there must be come place to start from which this exposition is intelligible and meaningful. Where is this place? Barth asks. Well, according to “modernist dogmatics” (i.e. Protestant liberalism), “the Church and faith are to be understood as links in a greater nexus of being” (p. 36). Thus, theology is understood on the basis of other human sciences (anthropology, metaphysics, etc.). Of course this proposition, as Barth notes, already has “a highly theological character” (p. 37) and involves the rejection of the church’s confession of revelation in Jesus Christ, as such Barth rejects it. On the other hand, Roman Catholicism has a different answer to this problem. The place from which theology can begin, on that view, is from the self-positing givenness of the Roman Church’s body of teaching through “Holy Scripture, Church tradition, and the living teaching apostlate of the Church infallibly representing and interpreting both” (p. 39). Barth rejects this option as well as in it “the action of God immediately disappears and is taken up into the action of the recipient of grace, that which is beyond all human possibilities changes at once into that which is enclosed within the reality of the Church, and the personal act of divine address becomes a constantly available relationship” (p. 40). Where does that leave us? Well, for “Evangelical dogmatics” it means that we don’t have a “place” in the world to start out from which it “can be known and said in advance, before actually embarking on dogmatics” what theology is and how it is possible. There is no general human or ecclesiastical possibility for specifying the correctness and possibility of theological knowledge. Rather this can only be an event, and event of God’s own speaking in Christ. Thus, “Only when and to the extent that such a Word of God is spoken by God Himself to the Church is there any right sense in speaking about God in the Church. Only when there is such a Word of God is there a criterion, namely, the Word itself, of the correctness of such speech and therefore of the correct criticism and correction of such speech, i.e., of dogmatics” (p. 42).

Money Quote: “The only possibility of dogmatics knowledge remaining to us on the basis of Evangelical faith is to be marked off on the one hand by the rejection of an existential ontological possibility of the being of the Church and on the other hand by the rejection of the presupposition of a constantly available absorption of the being of the Church into a creaturely form, into a ‘There is.’ On the one side we have to say that the being of the Church is actus purus, i.e., a divine action which is self-originating and which is to be understood only in terms of itself and not therefore in terms of a prior anthropology. And on the other side we have also to say that the being of the Church is actus purus, but with the accent now on actus, i.e., a free action and not a constantly available connexion, grace being the event of personal address and not a transmitted material condition. On both sides we can only ask how it may be otherwise if the being of the Church is identical with Jesus Christ. If this is true, then the place from which the way of dogmatic knowledge is to be seen and understood can be neither a prior anthropological possibility nor a subsequent ecclesiastical reality, but only the present moment of the speaking and hearing of Jesus Christ Himself, the divine creation of light in our hearts.” (p. 41)

Other Barth reading groups

Posted by on January 6, 2011 11 comments

I just wanted to make mention of several of the other groups reading through Barth’s Church Dogmatics around the blogosphere. In addition to ours, Cabe and Matt (and now Adam) have been reading through the CD for a while now. They are currently well into 2/I.

In addition, Daniel Kirk is also doing a read through at his own blog. Also, it should be noted that Jeremy powered through the whole thing like a champ last year and his various posts on the experience are quite a good read. I don’t know of any others, but I’m sure they’re out there, so by all means post a link to any others I’m unaware of.

Church Dogmatics §1 Comments

Posted by on January 6, 2011 3 comments

This is cross-posted from our ongoing reading/discussion blog, Reading through Church Dogmatics. I figure I’ll post my summary sections here the day after I post them on the reading group blog so I can index them as we go and maybe it’ll end up being a helpful resource for people interested in the Church Dogmatics.

§1.1 The Church, Theology, Science

Summary: Theology, Barth argues, is the self-examination of the church regarding the content of what it claims about God. Theology, for Barth, is interrogatory, it subjects the church to self-examination in light of the God that the gospel proclaims. As such theology is primarily a self-critical discipline rather than an apologetic, or an attempt to synthesize other human disciplines into a scientific whole. In fact, for Barth, whatever relationship there might be between theology and other human sciences isn’t really that big of a deal. The point is that theology, fundamentally, is about subjecting ourselves to judgment on the basis of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

Money Quote: “Theology does not in fact possess special keys to special doors. Nor does it control a basis of knowledge which might not find actualisation in other sciences. Nor does it know an object of enquiry necessarily concealed from other sciences. Only by failing to recognise the actualisation of revelation, the possibility of grace and therefore its own nature, could it possibly make any such claim.” (p. 5)

§1.2 Dogmatics as an Enquiry

Summary: First of all, since theology is a form of inquiry, that assumes that the truth about God can in fact be known by human beings. This assumption is made in the act of faith in Jesus Christ who “in His revelation gives Himself to faith” (p. 12) However, this means that Christian talk about God must constantly be tested by its conformity to Christ, an always ambiguous and uncertain enterprise. Ultimately it is “the freely acting God Himself and alone” who is “the truth of revelation” (p. 15-16). All our theological efforts can never be accorded the authority that ultimately belongs to the free and living Lord.

Money Quote: “Dogmatics is possible only as theologia crucis, in the act of obedience which is certain in faith, but which for this very reason is humble, always being thrown back to the beginning and having to make a fresh start. It is not possible as an effortless triumph or intermittent labour. It always takes place on the narrow way which leads from the enacted revelation to the promised revelation.” (p. 14)

§1.3 Dogmatics as an Act of Faith

Summary: Theology is an act of faith. It is undertaken by those who have been called together by Jesus Christ (the church). But faith itself is the “gracious address of God to [hu]man[ity], the free personal presence of Jesus Christ in his activity” (p. 18). As such dogmatics assumes not a human capacity or disposition, but rather depends wholly on the free, gracious, and present action of God in Christ. And thus the church cannot guarantee the possibility of doing dogmatics at all. It should set out to examine itself, interrogate itself, and strive for faithfulness, but it can only do so on the basis of hope, hope that God will be present, active, and will free us up in grace to speak rightly about the truth of the gospel. As such theological work must be understood finally as prayer (p. 23).

Money Quote: “Prayer can be the recognition that we accomplish nothing by our intentions, even though they be intentions to pray. Prayer can be the expression of our human willing of the will of God. Prayer can signify that for good or evil [hu]man[ity]justifies God and not himself. Prayer can be the human answer to the divine hearing already granted, the epitome of the true faith which we cannot assume of ourselves. We do not speak of true prayer if we say ‘must’ instead of ‘can.’” (p. 24)

Edited to add: Also, in the interest of directing conversation to the blog for the reading group, all of my own reflections/provocations will be included only in the original posts at the reading group blog. Over here we’ll just have the summaries and money quotes kept on file for indexing purposes down the road.

The blasphemy of the “incarnational church”

Posted by on November 11, 2010 15 comments

David Guretzki has posted a quote, with his own reflections, on Karl Barth’s provocative — but correct! — claim that to call the church an “extension of the incarnation” is ultimately blasphemous:

Thus to speak of a continuation or extension of the incarnation in the Church is not only out of place but even blasphemous. Its distinction from the world is not the same as His; it is not that of the Creator from His creature. Its superiority to the world is not the same as His; it is not that of the Lord seated at the right hand of the Father. Hence it must guard as if from the plague against any posturing or acting as if in relation to world-occurrence it were an alter Chrisus [another Christ], or a vicarius Christi [vicar of Christ], or a corredemptrix [co-redemptress] , or a mediatrix omnium gratiarum [mediator of all graces], not only out of fear of God, but also because in any such behaviour, far from really exalting itself or discharging such functions, it can only betray, surrender, hazard and lose its true invisible being, and therefore its true distinction from the world and superiority to world-occurrence. (CD IV.3.2, 729)

Be sure to check out the rest of David’s post for his own reflections, which are, in my opinion, right on the money.

Barth, church, mission

Posted by on May 31, 2010 Comments Off

More apropos comments from Karl Barth on the church and/as mission:

And now, finally, we can put the question and answer it from a very different standpoint.  The direction which was peculiar to the apostles and which we find in Scripture involved for them a particular and highly individual attitude and way of existence which we can only describe as supreme realism.  For them their discipleship, apostolate, authority, power and mission was not an end in itself.  From first to last — at this point we are forced back to our key thought — it was absolutely a matter of their service, their ministry as heralds.  As their distinctive title ‘apostle’ shows us, they were sent out to preach the Gospel in the world, a light which had been kindled to give light to all that are in the house (Matt. 5:15) — nothing more.  The character given to them is not great or significant in itself.  Not even in the highest conceivable sense is it a matter of their own good or ill, of their own honour, or even of the self-reposing structural importance and dignity of the work which they have to accomplish in this character.  Their being and their work both point beyond themselves.  Their field is the world, and they are only sowers who pass over it.  They renounce any self-grounded or self-reposing rightness or importance of their distinctive being and activity.  It is the special direction in which they look, to the One who has made them His and whom they have recognised as theirs, which forces them to make this renunciation.  It cannot be otherwise than that even in this renunciation they should be a normative pattern to the community gathered by their ministry.  As an apostolic Church the Church can never in any respect be an end in itself, but, following the existence of the apostles, it exists only as it exercises the ministry of a herald.  It builds itself up itself and its members in the common hearing of the Word of God which is always new, in common prayer, in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, in the practice of its inner fellowship, in theology.  But it cannot forget that it cannot do these things simply for its own sake, but only in the course of its commission — only in an implicit and explicitly outward movement to the world with which Jesus Christ and in His person God accepted solidarity, for which he died, and in which He rose again in indication of the great revelation of the inversion accomplished in Him.  For this reason the Church can never be satisfied with what it can be and do as such.  As His community it points beyond itself.  At bottom it can never consider its own security, let alone its appearance.  As His community it is always free from itself.  In its deepest and most proper tendency it is not churchly, but worldly — the Church with open doors and great windows, behind which it does better not to close itself in upon itself again by putting in pious stained-glass windows.  It is holy in its openness to the street and even the alley, in its turning to the profanity of all human life — the holiness which, according to Rom. 12:5, does not scorn to rejoice with them that do rejoice and to weep with them that weep. Its mission is not additonal to its being.  It is, as it is sent and active in its mission.  It builds up itself for the sake of its mission and in relation to it.  It does it seriously and actively as it is aware of its mission and in the freedom from itself which this gives.  If it is the apostolic Church determined by Scripture and therefore by the direction of the apostles, it cannot fail to exist in this freedom and therefore in a strict realism more especially in relation to itself.  And when it does this it cannot fail to be recognisable and recognised as apostolic and therefore as the true Church.  (CD IV/1, 724-25).

This happened

Posted by on February 2, 2010 14 comments

Whatever else we may want to say about him, or his theology, I cannot doubt that the God Barth wrestled with was the living God of the Gospel:

God was with us, with us His enemies, with us who were visited and smitten by His wrath. God was with us in all the reality and fulness with which He does what He does. He was with us as one of us. His Word became flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood. His glory was seen here in the depths of our situation, and the full depths of our situation were disclosed for the first time when illumined then and there by the Lord’s glory, when in His Word He came down to the lowest parts of the earth (Eph 4:9), in order that there and in that way He might rob death of its power and bring life and immortality to light (2 Tim 1:10). This happened, as having happened conclusively, totally, and sufficiently. . . . This ‘God with us’ has happened. It has happened in human history and as a part of human history. Yet it has not happened as other parts of history usually happen. It does not need to be continued or completed. It does not point beyond itself or merely strive after a distant goal. It is incapable of any exegesis or even the slightest addition or subtraction. Its form cannot be changed. It has happened as a self-moved being in the stream of becoming. It has happened as completed event, fulfilled time, in the sea of the incomplete and changeable and self-changing.

~ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 115-16.

Barth on Ideology

Posted by on January 31, 2010 7 comments

[Ideology] comes about as [one] thinks he can and should ascribe to the presuppositions and sketches he has achieved by his remarkable ability, not just a provisional and transitory but a permanent normativity, not just one that is relative but one that is absolute, not just one that is human but one that is quasi-divine.  His hypotheses become for him theses behind which he no longer ventures to go back with seeking, questioning, and researching.  He thinks that they can be thought and formulated definitively as thoughts that are not merely useful but instrinsically true and therefore binding.  His ideal becomes an idol.  He thinks that he knows only unshakable principles and among them a basic principle in relation to which he must coordinate and develop them as a whole, combining them all, and with them his perceptions and concepts, into a system, making of his ideas an ideology.  Here again the reins slip out of his hands.  This creature of his, the ideology, seems to be so wonderfully glorious and exerts on him such a fascination that he thinks he should move and think and act more and more within its framework and under its direction, since salvation can be achieved only through the works of its law.  This ideology becomes the object of his reflection, the backbone and norm of his disposition, the guiding star of his action.  All his calculations, exertions, and efforts are now predestined by it.  They roll towards its further confirmation and triumph like balls on a steep slope.  Man’s whole loyalty is loyalty to the line demanded by it.  He thinks that he possesses it, but in truth it already possesses him.  In relation to it he is no longer the free man who thought he had found it in its glory and should help to put it on the throne.  He now ventures to ask and answer only within its schema.  He must now orient himself to it.  He must represent it as its more or less authentic witness and go to work as its great or small priest and prophet. At root he no longer has anything of his own to say.  He can only mouth the piece dictated to him as intelligibly as he can, and perhaps like a mere parrot.  His own face threatens already to disappear behind the mask that he must wear as its representative.  He already measures and evaluates others only from the standpoint of whether they are supporters of this ideology, or whether they might become such, or whether they might at least be useful to it even without their consent, or whether they must be fought as its enemies. Its glory has already become for him the solution not only to the personal problem of his own life but to each and all of the problems of the world.

~ Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4, Lecture Fragments, 225.

Christ and Sexuality: Some Consequences

Posted by on June 12, 2009 72 comments

Follow me on this one for a second. Within the Christian tradition, I think its fairly uncontroversial that Jesus Christ is the archetype, the ultimate definition, the mesoform of what it means to be human. I suppose this could be disputed, but within Christian theology this is pretty axiomatic. Jesus’s own historical, contingent, particular human life defines what it means to be human in a way that is more significant than any other determinate factor of human existence.

If this is true, what implications might this have for a theology of marriage and sexuality? In CD III/4 Barth unfortunately defines humanness by sexual differentiation, thereby taking an Adamic definition for humanity rather than approaching the issue Christologically (see p. 158ff for example). In so doing, Barth makes sex and marriage the definition, or at least the full expression of the meaning of humanity. However, this is a decidedly non-Christological approach.

If we take Christology as our starting point, recognizing that (unless Dan Brown turns out to be right) Jesus was unmarried, not sexually active, and produced no children, we come to some very different conclusions. If the One who, in his life, crucifixion, and resurrection defined and actualized for us the very definition of humanness, what does that say about humanness? Clearly it says that marriage, sexual activity, and bearing children do not have any central place in the definition thereof.

Let us be absolutely clear on this point. If Christ is truly the fullness and definition of authentic humanity, we must say categorically that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness. If marriage, sex, and parenthood are somehow the fullness of humanity we are forced to say that Christ, far from being the true human as the Christian tradition proclaims, was in fact, sub-human. To grant sexuality any sort of ultimacy with respect to the definition of humanness is to deny that Jesus is the true human being.

So, if we take a Christological defintion for the meaning of humanness, sexuality by definition tells us absolutely nothing about the ultimate meaning of humanness. It may, through the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit be comandeered and become in many and sundry ways a parable of the kingdom, just as many of the trivial aspects of human life are open to God’s interruption and transfiguration. But, insofar as the meaning of authentic human existence, sexuality tells us nothing. Not if we really believe that Jesus defines for us what it means to be be human. And, further to this point, only when we allow sex to be truly and wonderfully insignificant, to be trivial, will it be able to be recived as a gift rather than gulpingly grasped in an idolatrous fit of fetishizing.

Good News About the New Dogmatics

Posted by on May 26, 2009 2 comments

Oh thank God.

Proclamation and Theology

Posted by on May 21, 2009 Comments Off

Again from Barth:

Like the subject-matter of Christianity, Church proclamation must also remain free in the last resort, free to receive the command which it must always receive afresh from the free life of the subject matter of Christianity. Church proclamation and not dogmatics is immediate to God in the Church. Proclamation is essential, dogmatics is needed only for the sake of it. Dogmatics lives by it to the extent that it lives only in the Church. In proclamation, and in God, revelation and faith only to the degree that these are its objects, dogmatics is to seek its material. (CDI/1, 87)

The Constant Uneasiness of Theology

Posted by on May 21, 2009 6 comments

Barth’s ruminations on theological method are interesting on multiple levels, not the least of which is the way his thought bears on how we understand the relationship(s) between Christian theology and ideology (critique).

The Church can neither question its proclamation absolutely nor correct it absolutely. It can only exert itself to see how far it is questioned and how far it ought to be corrected. On its human work it can only do again a human work of criticising and correcting. And because this is so, it will be far from thinking that it either wants or is able to rid itself of the attack on its proclamation, the uneasiness which God Himself has prepared for it. (CD I/1, 75-76)

Here Barth makes a supremely important point about the nature of theological thinking: its irreducible contingency. Theology is not and never can be absolute, rather it is a contingent human work. As such it cannot expect to arrive at absolute, necessary, indubitably certitude. Rather the church should not want to escape from its situation of contingency, because it is in this state of constant uneasiness before God that we learn obedience, and that we learn to live in the sort of patience that attunes us to receive God’s own liberating address.

Thus, the church’s theological task, vis a vis ideology is never done. We can never hope to extricate ourselves from ideology, from the need to have our conceptual formulations critiqued and reconstituted. We can inhabit this place of uneasiness, however, precisely, and only because of God’s active faithfulness in Christ who meets us in our contingency and speaks his liberating word of reconciliation and redemption. Only by virtue of God’s own invasive, redeeming, and transfiguring action do we have the hope of passing, in Nate Kerr’s term, from ideology to doxology.

Serious Theology

Posted by on May 21, 2009 1 comment

Barth certainly can always boast of his energy. Even in the most technical sections of the Church Dogmatics (and CD I/1 is almost certainly that) there is nothing but pure energeticness when it comes to the material of theology: the proclamation of the gospel:

Again, how disastrously the Church must misunderstand itself if it can imagine that theological reflection is a matter for quiet situations and periods that invite contemplation, a kind of peace-time luxury for which we are not only permitted but even commanded to find no time should things become really serious and exciting! As though there could be any more urgent task for a Church under assault from without than that of consolidating itself within, which means doing theological work! As though the venture of proclamation did not mean that the Church permanently finds itself in an emergency! As though theology could be done properly without reference to this constant emergency! Let there be no mistake, Because of these distorted ideas about theology, and dogmatics in particular, there arises and persists in the life of the Church a lasing and growing deficit for which we cannot expect those particularly active in this function to supply the needed balance. The whole Church must seriously want a serious theology if it is to have a serious theology. (CD I/1, 76-77)

Barth on Preaching and the Sacraments

Posted by on May 18, 2009 14 comments

In distinguishing Evangelical dogmatics from liberal Protestantism on the one hand, and Roman Catholicism on the other, Barth spends a great deal of time focusing on the issue of proclamation and the role in plays in the life of the  church. Here seems to be one of the central points at which Barth’s ecclesiology differs from and challenges Catholic ecclesiology and, more generally, any supremely sacramental ecclesiology.

In speaking of (and commending) the Reformers’ break with Rome, Barth argues that

Proclamation of the basis of the promise which has been laid once for all, and therefore proclamation in the form of symbolic action [the sacrament], had to be and to remain essential for them [the Reformers]. But this proclamation presupposes that the other [preaching], namely, repetition of the biblical promise, is taking place. The former must exist for the sake of the latter, and therefore the sacrament for the sake of preaching, not vice versa. (CD1/1, p. 70)

This seems to be one of the key issues for understanding Barth’s ecclesiology in contrast to Roman Catholicism and other strongly eucharistic traditions. For Barth the nature of grace as God’s “unfathomably free act” (p. 68) requires us to find the church’s “center” not in any act which the church possesses or hands on as if “there flows forth from Jesus Christ a steady and unbroken stream or influence of divine-human being on His people” (p. 68). Any such unbroken continuity between God’s free grace and the being of the church is to be rejected in Barth’s thought. There can be no embracing the idea of the sacrament as a “causare, continere el conferre gratiam” (causing, containing, and conferring grace, p. 69) in that the relationship between divine grace and human response cannot be one of cause and effect, but of “the Word and faith.”

Thus, at the heart of Barth’s claim here is an insistence that the church does not possess or cause grace through its own actions, even the sacraments. Rather the church’s “center” must be the proclamation of the Gospel through which God, thought the Holy Spirit brings people to faith in the event of hearing the Word. As such Barth’s ecclesiology (at least here) is strongly informed by a theology of the missio dei. The church exists by virtue of its being the passive recipient of God’s missional entrance into the world in Christ, which the church then proclaims as an act of obedience. What Barth offers is a missional ecclesiology centered on the ek-centric movement of God’s Word which the church hears and proclaims to the world rather than a sacramental eccesiology centered on the church’s mediation of grace to itself.

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