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Оглавлениеby T. F. Torrance
KARL BARTH is the greatest theological genius that has appeared on the scene for centuries. He cannot be appreciated except in the context of the greatest theologians such as Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, nor can his thinking be adequately measured except in the context of the whole history of theology and philosophy. Not only does he recapitulate in himself in the most extraordinary way the development of all modern theology since the Reformation, but he towers above it in such a way that he has created a situation in the Church, comparable only to the Reformation, in which massive clarification through debate with the theology of the Roman Church can go on. Karl Barth has, in fact, so changed the whole landscape of theology, Evangelical and Roman alike, that the other great theologians of modern times appear in comparison rather like jobbing gardeners.
Who is he?
Karl Barth is a native of Switzerland, born and brought up in the home of a Swiss pastor who when Karl was but two years old became a Professor of Church History in the University of Bern. It was in Bern that Karl Barth grew up and went up to University to study philosophy and theology, and from there he went on to the Universities of Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg. After spending some twelve years in the pastorate, mostly in the Alpine village of Safenwil in Aargau, he was called to be Professor of Reformed Theology in Göttingen. Then after more than a decade of teaching and debating in the Universities of Münster and Bonn, in which he was the living centre of a volcanic disturbance in the whole field of theological thinking, and the great mind behind the German Church’s struggle for survival against National-Socialism, he was ejected from Germany, and found refuge in Basel, the city of his birth, where he was appointed to the chair of Dogmatics, which for centuries had been occupied by some of the greatest thinkers of the Reformed Church.
What is he like?
Perhaps more than any other theologian of modern times Barth resembles Luther in his sheer Menschlichkeit. That is to say, he has an overflowing love for all things human, whether they are the simplicities of natural life or the great achievements of the human spirit, in the midst of which he manifests a frankness, and childlikeness, and sincerity toward other human beings, which can be both gentle and rough, but always with compassion. His whole attitude to life, and even to theology, is expressed in his passionate love for the care-free, light-hearted music of Mozart, in which the profoundest questions are put to the eternal and the creaturely alike without the dogmatic presumption to any final answer or last word, and it is to the accompaniment of Mozart’s music that his engagement in the hard work of dogmatics becomes sheer enjoyment of the majesty and beauty of God.
In the depth of this humanity Karl Barth has a fundamentally scientific cast of mind—the mind of eternal inquiry, relentlessly probing into everything he finds, not in order to master it or to show off his own powers over it, but to listen to it, to learn from it, to let it declare itself to him, to teach him how to articulate understanding of it sincerely and faithfully in accordance with its own inner nature and necessity and beauty. That is the humility of the scientist who will not impose theory arbitrarily upon what he investigates, but is always ready to reconstruct what he already thinks he has learned in order to make it possible to learn really new things. It is the eye of the artist who has the faculty of seeing what is actually there and can pick out its deepest and most characteristic forms with which to depict it and communicate it so that his own creative art is allowed to be the instrument of the reality of his subject. All Barth’s theology is characterized by relentless, irresistible questioning that uncovers the artificiality that constantly prevents us from attaining objectivity, and therefore has the most disturbing, critical effect in shaking the foundations, but only in order that the fundamental realities may be revealed and that genuine theological thinking may be built up on the concrete actuality of God’s revelation in Word and Act.
The basic concern of Barth is, however, not critical but positive. In spite of the fact that he is the great enemy of all attempts at constructing rational systems, that is, at imposing systematically upon the subject-matter of theology a rational schematism of our own devising, his is the most constructive and systematic of minds, but it is a mind that finds the co-ordinating principle of its thinking not in its own dialectic but in the forms of rationality inhering in the object or in the material content of theological knowledge. It is in order to uncover this objective depth of rationality that he employs such ruthless, tireless questioning in which he goes round and round the point he seeks to elucidate, interrogating it at every possible angle and every possible level, refusing to break it up into parts in order to master it, so that at last it can stand out in all its own objective and independent nature and form. Behind all this lies a passionate will to sympathy for what he investigates, whether it be the text of Holy Scripture, the concrete matter of some doctrine, or the mind of another theologian, and throughout the readiness to let himself be criticized by what he learns: that is to say, an openness or readiness of mind both for God and for man; and a determination to let God be God, man be man, and nature be nature.
Another aspect of Barth’s Menschlichkeit or humanity is his irrepressible humour. What we are concerned with here is the theological significance of this, for Barth’s humour plays a fundamentally critical role in his thinking. He is able to laugh at himself, and therefore to criticize himself, and hence also to direct his ruthless critique at others in such a way that he can appreciate their intention and respect their persons and their sincerity. Here he stands out in marked contrast to the seriousness with which nineteenth-century man took himself, and indeed to those today who make such heavy, boring play with what they call ‘modern man’. But above all Barth’s humour has critical significance for the nature and form of his own theological construction, for it means that he is ever open to the question as to the adequacy of his own thought-forms to their proper object, and that he will never let himself be a prisoner of his own formulations.
One can perhaps describe the critical significance of humour for Barth’s theology by recalling a Rembrandt painting, with its terrific concentration of illuminated significance in the centre, its contrast of darkness and light, and objective depth, but with the humour of a cherub peeping over at it from a corner of the canvas, unable to suppress a smile. In other words, Barth engages in his gigantic task of dogmatics with the consciousness that the angels are looking over his shoulder, reminding him that all theology is human thinking, and that even when we have done our utmost in faithfulness to what is given to us, all we can do is to point beyond and above to the transcendent truth and beauty of God, thereby acknowledging the inadequacy of our thought in response to God’s Word, but engaging in it joyfully, in gratitude to God who is pleased to let himself be served in this way by human thinking and to bless it in his grace.
One more aspect of Barth’s humanity we must note is its genius. That is to say, it is a humanity that is full of surprises. Here, although no doubt he would resent it, we may compare his theological thinking to the music of Beethoven with its breath-taking turns rather than to the predestined texture of Mozart’s inimitable compositions. Mozart may well be the greater genius, but when he has announced his theme and swept you into the skies like a lark, he creates in you the power of anticipation and you can hear the music from a long way off, and Barth certainly has that quality, too; but again and again Beethoven’s music suddenly breaks in upon your ear with astonishing novelty that startles you, and you protest that he has shattered the logic of his composition, but before you can recover your breath you find that he has worked the whole symphony into such a rich and complex movement that the new element actually contributes to its unity. That also is the genius of Karl Barth.
Again and again his contemporaries have spoken of a ‘new Barth’, and have described him as a bird on the wing, darting like a swallow into quite new directions, and yet they have not taken the measure of the depth and complexity of this man’s thought, or of the immense fertility of his fundamental simplicities which enable him to hold within a profound unity elements which in other lesser minds fall apart into contradictions or hopeless antinomies. The reason for this is the incredible intensity with which Barth holds all his thinking in obedience to its object—the Lord God, the infinite and eternal, who has stooped to reveal himself in Jesus Christ and in him has taken us up to share with him his own divine life.
How did it all begin?
It took its rise in the struggle of the young minister with the Word of God in an Alpine community composed largely of agricultural and industrial workers. Sunday by Sunday Barth was faced with the problem of bringing the Word of God to a waiting congregation expecting to hear, not the minister’s views or those of the Church, but God’s own Word.
The problem was twofold. How could he preach a genuine Word of God, and not just his own word? How could the congregation hear it as Word of God and not confound it with something they wanted to tell themselves? The problem was made more difficult for the minister by the fact that he knew he must be a man whose heart is steeped in his own times, who is sensitive to the needs of his own times, who shares with his contemporaries their life, their problems, their hopes, who is, in fact, identified with them. But the extent of that identity made it difficult for him to remain free enough for the Word of God, to come under its mastery, to be a pliant instrument in its hands, and so to be the voice of its proclamation to the people.
How could he distinguish an independent Word of God from his own ideas and wishes, and distinguish the objective reality of divine revelation from his own subjective states and conditions? How could he communicate it and really be heard in a Church in which Christianity is already so deeply assimilated to a way of life that the message proclaimed from the pulpit is inevitably heard only as an expression of that way of life? If something really new and different is actually proclaimed, will not the people just blink and turn away, like a cow staring at a new gate, as Luther said so long ago?
The preacher was confronted by an immense difficulty, within him and within the congregation, a problem created by the fact that Christianity had become so assimilated to the bourgeois culture of modern man that everywhere it appeared as a manifestation of that culture. No doubt the world of the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Europe had been profoundly influenced by Christianity, and yet Christianity had become little more than an aspect of the historical life of European civilization; the Church had become so much world that it was no longer able really to stand over against it and bring a genuine message to the world. What it had to say and do fitted in only too well with what people wanted and desired: like people, like priest; like nation, like Church; like culture, like theology.
Faced with this problem, Barth did two things. He spent a good part of his week wrestling with the Scriptures, notably with Ephesians, Corinthians, and Romans, struggling to grasp the Word within the words, and letting it attack and criticize himself. But he threw himself into the activities of the social democrat party at work in his parish, in order to identify himself with his people, to gain an understanding of their political and social problems, to become one of the proletariat with a sympathetic understanding for them. On the one hand, he sought to identify himself with the Word of God, and on the other hand, he sought to identify himself with his people.
Two discoveries followed. Barth’s wrestling with the New Testament and especially with the Epistle to the Romans opened up for him what he called the strange new world within the Bible—and what did that for him most of all was the mighty voice of St Paul to which he had hitherto been largely a stranger. This was the discovery of the supernatural nature of the Kingdom of God, of the Word of God as the mighty living act of God himself that came breaking into the midst of man’s life, setting it into crisis, shaking its false foundations, and bringing to bear upon it the very Godness of God. This Word came to Barth with such force, as divine Event, that it refused to be integrated with anything he knew before, objected to being assimilated to the culture in which he was so profoundly steeped, but rather called it into question. It was a Word that interrupted his thoughts, and forced him into dialogue with God; it was a Word that attacked the secularization of Christianity, and uprooted his convictions, re-creating them and giving them an orientation from a centre in God rather than in man. Here was the sharpest clash between the Word of the transcendent Creator God, and the word of man which he seeks to project into God out of the depths of his own self-consciousness. It is the Word of God directed to man that brings a message that is utterly new, and at the same time reveals the nature of man as the creature directly addressed by God and summoned within his historical existence to live his life not out of himself but out of God.
The other discovery was the infinite love and compassion of God, who in spite of his infinite transcendence and distance, condescends to man in order to share his deepest agony and hurt, and to heal and reconcile him and restore him to the Father. The Word of God is certainly the Word of judgement, that searches us out to the roots of our being, and pierces through all artificiality, and thwarts every attempt on man’s part to make himself out to be divine or to deck himself out in divine clothing. But it is above all a Word of reconciliation—and a mighty victorious Word at that, the Word of the all-conquering love of God that will not be put off, but that insists on achieving its end. For that very reason it is a Word with a total claim upon the whole of man’s existence, and one that will not allow any part of it to elude God’s creative and redeeming purpose. Far from being an abstract Word, it is the Word that strikes into the depths of human existence, that encounters man in the midst of his actuality, and approaches him as the concrete act of God in human history.
Barth took both these two poles of his discovery with deep seriousness, and bent all his energies and talents to bring the Word as he heard it to bear directly upon the life and thought of his people as he understood them. It inevitably meant a clash with the idealistic conceptions of the social democrats—not that he was any the less concerned with their social passion, but that he could not go with them in identifying the Kingdom of Christ with the social order of life for which they struggled. This very alliance of his revealed all the more intensely the deep malaise of the Church, its assimilation of the Gospel to the bourgeois culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and showed him that the message of the Gospel could only be brought to bear upon man in that condition when a hiatus was torn between the Gospel and culture, when God could be heard in his divine Word in such a way that it did not imperceptibly become accommodated to a word that man had already heard and could just as easily tell to himself.
Out of this pastorate at Safenwil came Barth’s notorious Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, in two editions, one following hard on the heels of the other. It was designed to bring the Word of God heard through the mighty voice of St Paul home to the Church in such a way that it was allowed to storm its way through the barriers and ramparts built up against it by the self-assertion of man clothed in the garb of historic Christianity. It was an attempt to wrestle with the Gospel of the New Testament in such a way that the walls of history that separated its writing from the present became transparent and the Gospel shone through directly in its uninhibited and apocalyptic force upon Church and world, and above all upon civilized, cultured, religious man.
The first edition aroused such attention that it brought—to his utter surprise—the call to the chair of Reformed theology in Göttingen, which he could not avoid, much as he would have liked, but meantime he had been rewriting his Commentary, which he completed just as he left for Göttingen. It was with the publication of this second edition that the storm broke, for the commentary was an all-out assault upon Neo-Protestant Christianity and Theology.
It succeeded far beyond Barth’s expectations, for it created, or rather was the means of creating in God’s hands, the seismic disturbance that changed the whole course of modern theology, and made it face as never before since the Reformation the basic message of the Bible. From beginning to end it challenged theology to consider the sheer Godness of God and the downright humanity of man. Therefore it penetrated down to the foundations of modern religion and theology, laid bare its accommodation to the pantheistic and monistic background of romantic-idealistic philosophy and culture, and sought to cut the strings of that connexion wherever it found it in every shape and form, in order to make it possible to think cleanly and soberly of God in a way appropriate to God, and of man in a way appropriate to his nature as man and child of God. It had to assert, therefore, the infinite qualitative distance between God and man, the sheer transcendence of the Word of God addressed to man plumb down from above, the absolute newness of grace, and therefore the judgement and crisis that it brought to all human religion.
The Commentary created upheaval for Barth as well as for his contemporaries—and that was necessary, for he, too, needed still to be uprooted radically and replanted by the Word of God. Much of the criticism he let loose bounced back upon him, and he was not slow to see its relevance to his own position, for he did not flinch to wield the same sword against himself. But in the midst of the upheaval and ferment, he was able to see the way ahead, and to start out upon the work of clearing the ground that occupied the next ten years, of ploughing and sowing, and reaping and ploughing again. And all the time the academic debate was being matched by engagement with the developing crisis in Germany, in the struggle of a resurgent naturalism, empowered by natural theology, against the Gospel which flung the Church up against the wall, where it had to learn again the meaning of the majesty and uniqueness of God: ‘I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me’, and also the majesty and uniqueness of Jesus Christ, the Son of God: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me.’
It was during these ten years that the essays and lectures published in this volume, Theology and Church, were written and delivered. In them we can see how Barth’s mind moved as he set out from the second edition of the Romans to travel the road toward his life-work, the construction of the Church Dogmatics, in which evangelical and reformed theology of the Word is given its most massive and formidable expression, not only over against the Church of Rome, but within the context of the growth and development of all theology in ancient and modern times, in the East as well as in the West. Whether or not contemporary theology agrees with Barth, it cannot avoid the questions he has raised, or avoid dealing with the situation he has created. If advance is to be made, it will not be by going round him, but only by going through him and beyond—and yet since Barth’s theology is so deeply integrated with the whole history of dogma, any attempt to go through and beyond him must ask whether it may not be trying to leave the Christian Church behind. It may well be that Barth’s ultimate influence upon the whole Church will be comparable with that of Athanasius.
The purpose of this introduction is not to expound the positive content of Barth’s mature theology, but to reveal the context in which it is to be understood, to show the direction in which it has moved, and to indicate the great concerns in connexion with which it has been elaborated. In order to do that we shall have to consider the movement of his thought through the period covered by this volume up to the point where, in 1931, he made his final orientation before settling down to the writing of his Church Dogmatics. But to map out the road he has travelled and to make clear the difficulties he had to overcome, as well as to show the relevance of his theology for the whole of modern life and thought, we shall consider his theology in relation to Culture, to the positive task of the Church in proclaiming the Word of God, and then the relation, as Barth sees it, between theology and philosophy, and between theology and science.
1. Theology and Culture
Barth was nurtured in the positive evangelical theology of the Reformed Church, and from end to end his thought continues to reveal the masterful influence of Calvin upon him, and from behind Calvin, the influence of Augustine, the two greatest ‘idealist’ theologians, as he has called them, in the history of the Church. And yet, as we shall see, Barth’s own theology is basically realist.
Early in his University training Barth came under the spell of Kant and Schleiermacher, and began to find congenial the theological movements which in the first decades of this century fell within the orbit of their influence. But in Germany Barth had to come to terms with the teaching and influence of Luther and Aquinas—with Luther because of the great revival of Luther studies and the dominating influence of the Lutheran Church; and with Aquinas because he had to think his way through the theology of the Reformation over against Roman and Thomist theology. There can be no doubt that Kant, Schleiermacher, Luther, and Aquinas—with a strong dash of Kierkegaard—constantly came into his reckoning, not only because of their exposition of ethics and doctrine, but because of the European culture which they have so effectively influenced.
No one has appreciated more than Barth the colossal task of the Christian Church during the last three hundred years in giving intelligent and intelligible expression to the Christian faith in the midst of the greatest advances in the history of civilization. An effort on the part of the Church that could measure up to the astonishing developments in the sciences and arts was required, an achievement of the human spirit within the realm of religion comparable to the achievement of the human spirit in its triumph over nature. That was the task undertaken by Schleiermacher early in the nineteenth century, undertaken with a genius that matched the brilliant culture in the midst of which he lived, and indeed widely regarded as the finest expression of that culture. Schleiermacher’s work affected the whole of the rest of the century, for generations of theologians, whether they followed Neo-Kantian or Neo-Hegelian tendencies, or broke out into more psychological interpretations of the Christian faith, built upon what he did, and even Roman theology absorbed not a little from him. In this development Christianity was set forth as the most sensitive quality of modern civilization, and the religious consciousness it mediated was looked upon as the holy flame in the innermost shrine of culture. Intellectually, the Christian faith was looked upon as a necessary and essential element in the development of the human mind, and its doctrines as rational determinations of social and ethical structure. Hence there grew up that profound assimilation of Christianity to culture and culture to Christianity that poured over from the nineteenth into the twentieth century.
According to Barth, there was a fundamentally right intention in this development, for the Christian Gospel must be articulated within the understanding of men, and must be communicated to the age in such a way that it is addressed to it in the midst of its spiritual and mental growth, and its literary and artistic creations. But what a task the Church had to face in addressing itself to the age of Kant and Hegel, of Goethe and Schiller, and many others, not to speak of the world of music and art! The theology of the nineteenth century manifested a responsibility for modernity which, Barth declares, we can hardly respect enough—but in making it its supreme task to speak to the age, it so accommodated its teaching to the masterful developments of the age, above all in romantic-idealist philosophy and in the natural sciences, that it came near to betraying itself altogether. Indeed, in the steady resolve not to interpret Christianity in such a way that it would conflict with the methods and principles of historical and scientific research or philosophical reflection, it lost a grip upon its own essence as theology and became basically anthropocentric, and so was unable to serve the advance of culture as it desired, for it had no positive word to say to culture which that culture did not already know and had not already said to itself in ways more congenial to it. That is the sickness unto death that lies behind so many of the troubles of Europe—the fatal collapse in ethics manifested in the first world war and later, the atheistic insistence that theology is nothing but anthropology, and that God is but the projection of man’s own ego or the objectification of his own dreams or desires, the materialism of the Marxist recoil from idealistic religion, the strange terrible lapse back into baalistic nature-mysticism and nature-religion with its arbitrarily deified principalities and powers and dominations. It is the naturalization of the Church and the divinization of nature that follows upon the confusion of God with nature or the confusion of God with reason. Behind it all Barth sees the corrupting influence of ‘natural theology’.
In order to throw the problem into clear relief we may note three (among other) elements in this assimilation of Christianity to culture and its romantic-idealist background which Barth sought to expose.
(a) In seeking to conquer the consciousness of the age on its own ground theology undertook a radical reinterpretation of Christianity in terms of inwardness. This took two forms. On the one hand, a sharp dichotomy was posited between what Schleiermacher called the sensuous and the spiritual, while Christianity was interpreted in terms of a developing ascendency of spirit over nature. Hence what needed to be carried out in the nineteenth century was a basic re-editing of those sensuous elements in the Christian tradition which appeared to belong to a more primitive stage of development, and a reinterpretation of them in terms of spirit and pure consciousness. On the other hand, spirit came to be regarded rather as the insideness of things, and therefore as the other side of material objectivity and as correlated to nature. In either way there came about a direct identity between the Holy Spirit of God and the spirit of man or such a mutual reciprocity between the two that it amounted to identification in practical and theoretical elaboration. Hence the development of Neo-Protestant thinking from the Enlightenment and Pietism into the combination of rationalism and subjectivity, so characteristic of idealism, was looked upon as the emergence of the real essence of the Reformation, that is, through a discarding of the objective elements in the teaching of the Reformers and a denigration of them as survivals of Catholicism. But what this really meant was that Christianity was interpreted only as the inner side of the developing culture of the nineteenth century, and was treated as of only aesthetic and symbolic significance. It was thus inevitable that Christianity should come to be regarded as a harmless musical overtone in the mighty symphony of science or as an anachronistic survival of the past that could only hinder scientific progress in the present and future.
(b) But if Christianity was to play any part in this developing culture it had to take its due part within the field of scientific study. It was in the realm of history that the overlap of theology and science was to be found, so that a scientific theology was pursued as the critical reflection and interpretation of historical religious self-consciousness, that is, as Troeltsch expressed it, the self-interpretation of the spirit so far as it is a matter of its own productions of itself in history. God himself is not objectifiable, for he does not give himself as such to our experience, but what is given to us is an awareness of him in the experience of the individual and of the community in the form of determinations of historical consciousness. It will be the task of theology to reflect upon that, to dig out and sift out the ideas embedded in that history and reinterpret them as living co-determinants of the human spirit in the present. Thus scientific theology will be concerned with historicism, with the investigation of the objective events of history and with an interpretation of historical ideas.
That may be carried out through an attempt to examine the whole history of the Christian Church and of its doctrine and to penetrate into some fundamental essence of Christianity as the kernel of it all, as Harnack sought to do, or it may take the way of interpreting the Christian Religion in the context of and in the light of universal religion with a view to eliciting the basic religious a-priori which enables us to understand and interpret this inner side of the development of the human spirit. It may take a speculative form in which the crude realistic narrative form of the Christian faith as it has been handed down from early times is to be stripped away like a garment grown too tight in order that the timeless essence or the ideas embodied in it may be allowed to emerge into the open. Or it may take a more existentialist form in which the outward events and their realist interpretation in terms of the acts of God in space and time are looked upon as mythological expressions of a deeply significant way of life, and therefore they are not to be stripped away but either reinterpreted in modern scientific myths as more adequate vehicles of meaning or employed as occasions and challenges to attain the same kind of authentic existence that the creative spirituality of the early Church revealed when it threw up these significant mythological forms traditionally called doctrines.
What is all this in the end but to subject Christianity entirely to history on the one hand and so to subordinate it to its relativities and transiencies, and on the other hand to co-ordinate it, not rationally, but by some ‘existential leap of faith’ with another realm of ‘meaning’ which is neither susceptible of conceptual articulation in its own right, nor amenable to rational criticism and investigation? And what else can this lead to but to the identification of Christianity with the basic Weltanschauung or attitude to existence that already lurks in the prior understanding of ‘historical man’? And what has this to do with the Gospel, that is, with genuine news communicated to man, for is it not, after all, something that natural man can hear from himself through existentialist analysis, something that is inseparable from a secularized culture?
(c) But there is another line of development that must be noted, not one concerned so much with history considered as the product of man’s creative spirituality or with the existentialist fear of rational criticism, but with a psychological analysis and interpretation of the religious self-consciousness that is deliberately pursued as an extension of the Cartesian line of thought—what Wobbermin called ‘religio-psychological existential thought’. This is a line of thought which takes seriously the inter-relation between man’s knowledge of God and his self-knowledge, and between his self-knowledge and knowledge of God, that is, the correlation between God and man, but it is one which thinks away the free ground of that correlation in God, takes its starting-point in man’s immediate self-consciousness, and makes its ultimate criterion man’s certainty of himself. Even if that means starting from a religious I-consciousness and returning to it as the criterion of certainty it involves a religio-psychological circle which is fundamentally ‘vicious’, for it has no objective ground independent of its subjective movement, and no point where its circular movement comes to an end, since the ‘God’ at the opposite pole is only the correlate of man’s consciousness, and so points back to man for its testing and truth.
In all these different movements there is, insists Barth, a basic homogeneity of method from Schleiermacher to Bultmann, in which theological thinking takes its rise from a basic determination in the being of man, so that the only truth it is concerned with or can be concerned with is truth for man, truth which can be validated only by reference to his self-explication controlled by historical analysis of human existence. Two fundamental propositions are involved in this whole line of thought: a. Man’s meeting with God is a human experience historically and psychologically fixable; and b. this is the realization of a religious potentiality in man generally demonstrable. These fundamental propositions remain essentially the same even if the idiom is changed to that of existentialism. It is this line of thought which throws up a theology in which the Church and faith are regarded as but part of a larger context of being and in which dogmatics is only part of a more comprehensive scientific pursuit which provides the general structural laws that determine its procedure, and so are the test of its scientific character. This means that theology can be pursued only within the prior understanding, and by submission to a criterion of truth, derived from a general self-interpretation of man’s existence; so that theological activity is merely the servant of man’s advancing culture, and the tool of a preliminary understanding which, as Bultmann has said, is reached ‘prior to faith’.
The point where this line of thinking creates the most acute difficulty, Barth says, is in its interpretation of Jesus Christ, as we can see already in the theology of Schleiermacher, where it is evident that in spite of its Christo-centrism, Jesus Christ fits rather badly into the system. We can indicate this problem from another point of view, by noting the influence of French impressionism upon interpretation or the science of hermeneutics. Normally when one reads an author one understands what he says by looking with him at the ‘object’ to which he points or which he describes, but early in the nineteenth century there grew up the tendency to study the text of an author in its correlation with the ‘subject’ or the author himself rather than in its correlation with the objective reality he intended, and so to read it as an expression of his individuality or genius. It was largely under the influence of Schleiermacher, followed by Lücke and Dilthey, that theological interpretation made this fundamental change in direction, but it was an essential by-product of the romantic movement of the nineteenth century as a whole, and derived ultimately from the Renaissance.
Applied to the New Testament, however, this meant that the focus of attention was not so much upon Jesus Christ himself in his ontological reality as Son of God become man, or even as objective historical Figure, but upon the creative spirituality of the early Church which produced the interpretation of Jesus we have mediated to us through the New Testament, and only upon Jesus as the occasion or co-determinant of this religious consciousness. Hence the real function of the New Testament was held not to be the communication of divine truth and revelation, but to be the means of provoking us to discover and take up a similar way of life to that manifested by the first generation of Christians. The fact that their way of life was expressed in what must appear to us (it is said) crude mythological forms can only be a challenge to us to probe behind it all to the essential meaning that it enshrined. Looked at in this way, it becomes apparent that there is basically little difference between Schweitzer’s insistence that we must use the apocalyptic portrait of Jesus in the Gospels like a painting of Van Gogh to help us ‘tune in’ to the Weltanschauung behind it all, and Bultmann’s insistence that we must use the whole ‘mythological framework’ of the New Testament Kerygma as the occasion for an ‘existential decision’ through which we can reach authentic existence.
Barth’s contention is that, apart from the questionable quasi-scientific character of this procedure, far from revealing the essential nature of the Gospel, it reduces it once more to an expression of transient human culture by correlating it to an independent and general anthropology. Schweitzer has shown so clearly, and Bultmann knows very well, that ‘the historical Jesus’ constructed by the scholars of the nineteenth century was a ‘Jesus’ dressed up in the thoughts and ideas of the nineteenth century and tailored to fit into the satisfactions of modern man, but because the Jesus reached in that way is always a construction of our own, that does not allow us to by-pass the objective reality of the historical Jesus Christ in order to focus our attention upon something fundamentally different—whatever we may call it, ‘the anonymous spirit of Jesus’, or ‘authentic existence’, or anything else—for in so doing we are projecting our own self-understanding in his place, substituting man’s creative spirituality for the Word of God, and engaging in a new mythology. Does not all this mean that we have renounced rational knowledge of God, and are seeking to impose forms of our own upon ‘faith’ which we have drawn from the structures of historical existence and society as we have found them? Does all this carry us one step beyond Schleiermacher? Is it not rather a more dangerous and menacing subjectivism, if only because it thinks it is free from it? Thus Barth’s historical studies will not allow him to think of the existentialist exegesis and existentialist theology as something apart, for it does not matter whether it derives its anthropology from Schleiermacher and his school or from Heidegger and his school—the fact that it subjects Christianity to a prior understanding of human existence reachable apart from revelation and faith, and so interprets the Word of God not out of its own objective rationality, but out of some special potentiality or knowledge alleged to belong to man as such, means that this theology is only a manifestation of secular human culture, and that what is essentially and distinctively Christian has been allowed to slip away like sand through the fingers.
It was especially in the second edition of the Commentary on Romans, as we have seen, that Barth launched his attack upon the false assimilation of Christianity to culture, and upon the immanentism and pantheism which that involved. What he sought to do was to create what he called a diastasis, a radical separation between theology and culture, which he felt to be eminently necessary if we were to think clearly again about God, and about man, and of their reconciliation in Jesus Christ. It was part of the intention of the Romans to free man’s understanding of Jesus Christ from the prior understanding of culture which dragged him down into historical existence as interpreted by man himself, and to insist that a proper theological procedure involved an approach to him which let our previous understanding and naturalistic Weltanschauungen be called into question. It was an attempt to let God himself in all his justifying grace call the bluff of civilized European man, in order to induce him to think soberly, that is, in such a way that he learns to distinguish the objective realities from his own subjective states and conditions.
The intention of the Romans was by no means an attack on culture as such, but rather the opposite, upon a bogus mystification of culture which required to be disenchanted of its secret divinity before it really could be human culture. Thus the thinking of Barth at that stage was dynamically dialectical, for he sought to bring both the No of God against all man’s attempt to make himself as God, and yet to bring the Yes of God’s victorious love and mercy to bear upon man in his agony and despair in order that he might find healing, not in reconciling principles of his own devising, but in the reconciling grace of God alone. Already there is apparent in the Romans that immense emphasis upon humanity, as that to which God has directed his saving love, and to which we also in obedience to God must direct our attention in the humanity of our fellow men, but in the polemic to achieve a proper distance or diastasis the negative emphasis appeared, perhaps inevitably, greater than the positive.
Barth tells us in one of the prefaces to the Romans that the strangest episode that had befallen his commentary was its friendly reception by Bultmann and its equally friendly rejection by Schlatter! But that helped to open Barth’s eyes to his own theological position, for he discovered how deeply he himself was engulfed in the very notions he had been attacking, in the idea, for example, that God and man are posited together in a sort of coexistence which did not allow man to think of God except in a reciprocal relation to himself, so that man’s hearing of God and understanding of God itself belonged to the reality of the Word of God. Thus the ten years that followed the publication of the second edition of Romans were years of critical self-examination for Barth as he engaged in the many debates with Lutherans and Romans, orthodox confessionalists and liberal Protestants alike. Meantime the form of existentialism which he had himself advocated in the Romans, with its attendant notions such as of a timeless eschatology of pure event, had its measure of influence upon men like Bultmann and Gogarten, but while they moved on in the same direction, Barth moved out and beyond to make the centre and ground of his thinking the concrete act of God in Jesus Christ, not in any semi-pelagian correlation of God and man, but in the grace of God alone, which is the creative source and preservation of true humanity. It was on that ground that Barth set out eventually to build up a constructive theology, which laid the foundation for a genuine theological culture, without the confounding of God and man that is destructive both of good theology and good culture.
2. Theology and the Church
As we have seen, Karl Barth was concerned from the very start of his ministry with the problem of how to speak of God seriously to his congregation, and so to speak that in and through his speaking it was God’s own Word that was being heard. He was convinced that such speaking is not an art that can be learned and mastered like some technique, for even when a pastor does his utmost to speak within the realm of revelation and faith, he knows that nothing he can do can make his very human speech to be speech of God. He is faced, therefore, with the perplexing situation in which he ought to speak God’s Word and yet cannot speak God’s Word, for he cannot speak it as God speaks it. Therefore if God himself is to be heard when man speaks in his Name that can only be a miracle—because it is not something that falls within human possibility, it is a possibility that is thinkable only at the point where man’s possibilities come to an end. But that belongs to the minister’s essential mission, to know that he cannot of himself speak God’s Word, and therefore in his endeavour to speak what he has heard from God, he points away from himself to God in order to let God speak and God be heard not only in and through his attempts to proclaim God’s Word but in spite of his attempts. Because it is God who has commanded him to speak in his Name, God will himself fulfil what he commanded, and in his grace employ human preaching in obedience to his Word as his own very Word to men.
Theology cannot be pursued on any other ground than that: the theologian’s task is undertaken at the same command and in reliance upon the same grace in which God promises to make himself heard. But theology also has a critical task to perform. Just because God’s grace abounds in the midst of human speaking about God, that does not allow us to sin or to err in order that grace may abound. Rather does God’s grace lay such total claim upon us that we are summoned to responsible self-critical service of his Word, as those who have to give an account of their stewardship to God. Theology may thus be described as the critical activity serving the ministry of the Word of God in the midst of the Church. The Church must put its own preaching to the test to see whether it is really preaching of God’s Word or simply a form of self-expression. Theology is the critical task that refers preaching back to its source in the Word of God, to make sure that it is really what is heard from God that is preached and not something that is thought out by man and thrust into the mouth of God.
All this meant that Barth had to clarify for himself the meaning of revelation. Early in his theological career he came to hold that in revelation God is actively engaged revealing himself and that the only God we know is this God who reveals himself, God-in-his-revelation, God-in-his-Word who comes to us, acts upon us, and summons us into responsible relation to himself. Concretely that means that God reveals himself in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, and that this revelation creates out of the world a community of those who hear and respond and who by the impact of that revelation become the realm within which God continues to reveal himself through his Word to the world. This is the line of positive thinking that Barth found himself building up throughout the polemical years from the beginning of his professorship at Göttingen to the end of that at Bonn. There are several important elements here that we may look at one by one.
In the first place, Barth held with increasing vigour that revelation is act of God, dynamic event impinging upon us. This was held in conscious contrast to the view of Schleiermacher that God is to be thought of from the side of man’s feeling of utter dependence, rather than from the side of any active intervention on God’s part—hence doctrines have their ground in the emotions of religious self-consciousness, and not in any direct communication of truth. Admittedly Schleiermacher’s insistence that we must think of God as the co-determinant of this feeling of absolute dependence was intended by him to be an expression of the objectivity of God, that is, the unobjectifiable otherness or transcendence of God, but in point of fact, it yielded fruit of an opposite kind. Just because God-consciousness and self-consciousness are inextricably woven together in our experience, theology represents the projection into the mouth of a mute God the reflections of man upon his own feelings, or, to put it the other way round, it means the dragging of knowledge of God down within the circle of our own subjectivity.
As against the development of that line of thought going out from Schleiermacher Barth insists on the activity of God as the mark of his transcendence and freedom and independent objectivity. It is just because God actively reveals himself, because his revelation is and ever remains pure act which will never resolve itself into some effective receptivity or subjective condition of mine, that I continue to encounter it as genuine revelation, as Word of God addressed to me, which I cannot and must not mistake for a word of my own or convert into a word I can tell myself. God’s Word is unlike our words, for it is creative Word, Word that is also Act, and so Word that resists our attempts to domesticate or subdue it to forms of our own understanding, Word that acts creatively upon us, thereby calling us in question and summoning us to conform ourselves to it. Indeed God’s Word is an act of aggression on his part, for it is grace that contradicts us in our self-will, and so confronts us with a decision in which we have to act against ourselves in self-renunciation and repentance. It is through the objection of God’s active revelation that we are able to distinguish it from our own subjectivities and know it to be really objective reality independent of us, real Word of God, as distinct from mere word of man.
In the second place, Barth became convinced that one of the great decisive issues in the history of the Church, and therefore of theology, was the relation of revelation to the Being and Person of God himself—Revelation, as Calvin had taught, is God speaking in Person. In other words, Revelation is God-in-his-revelation, God-in-his-Word. As Barth read his Church history he saw that this was the supreme importance of the struggle of the Church in the early centuries for a true and faithful Christology. What the Church insisted on guarding at all costs in the Nicene Christology is that God communicates himself in his revelation—not just something of himself, not just something about himself, but very God himself. That is the meaning of the Trinity, that in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit it is God in his Godness who confronts us. Hence in believing in his revelation we believe in God himself, and we believe in God by believing in his revelation.
The Reformation represents a new struggle within the Church for the same truth expressed in the Council of Nicaea, by its insistence that Jesus Christ is very God and very man, and that the Holy Spirit is the Lord, the Giver of Life. In other words, it is the truth that God’s gift is identical with himself the Giver. The point of battle was doubtless the conception of grace, and the objectivity of divine grace was clarified in a struggle over justification by grace alone, but in and throughout it all it was the same truth, that in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit God comes to us in Person and gives us himself. God himself is the content of his revelation, and himself the content of his saving grace—grace does not pass over into some subjective state of ours, or into some transferable quality of the soul, and revelation is not something that inheres in the Church, but God actively confronting us with his own Person, and revealing his own Being in that action.
Is it not precisely the same battle that needs to be fought all over again in the twentieth century, but one which combines the forms which the battle took both in the fourth and in the sixteenth century: God and no other is the content of his revelation, and God is himself really the content of it? When we speak of ‘Christ’ is it really God himself in his revelation we mean? And when we speak of the Holy Spirit, is it really God himself in his freedom to be present with us, or is it just our spirit that we mean? Is it not the Godness of God in his revelation that has been lost, and is that not the cause of the secularization of the Church and the secularization of modern man? Has revelation not somehow just become identified with change and improvement in the life of man? Has not knowledge of God come to mean something that goes on in the depths of the human soul? Hence is it not high time to take seriously again the ancient cause of the Church, renewed with such vigour at the Reformation, that God’s revelation is the revelation of God himself, of God-in-his-revelation, and that he is to be known only out of himself, for the God whom we know in revelation is God who remains Subject even when making himself the object of our knowledge? Hence Barth insists that theology is concerned with a knowledge of God that takes its rise from the sovereign act of his self-revelation and which is actualized only by way of recognition and acknowledgement of the truth of God as the one reality that is grounded in itself and therefore to be understood, derived, substantiated only out of itself. It is the knowledge of the one Truth of God who is of and through himself alone, and therefore a knowledge that is in accordance with the nature of that which is known; it is the knowledge of the ultimate Truth which by its very nature cannot be measured by any standard outside of it or higher than it, for there is no such standard—rather does every other truth take its origin from this Truth and point away to it as its goal.
In the third place, Barth insists that revelation is rational event, for in revelation God communicates to us his Word, and conveys to us his Truth, requiring of us a rational response in accordance with the rational nature of his Word, and a self-critical relation to his Truth as it calls us in question. Not only is revelation God’s Act and his Being in that Act, but Logos, the source and fountain of all rationality, and therefore knowledge of God in his revelation is rational in its own right, rational on the ground of the supreme and self-sufficient rationality of its object, God-in-his-Word. Thus in revelation theology is concerned with a depth in objective rationality that transcends that of any other kind of knowledge and of every other kind of science. Barth will have nothing to do, therefore, with some kind of faith-knowledge that is basically romantic and non-conceptual and which needs rationalizing through borrowed forms from ethics and philosophy. Knowledge of revelation is ab initio rational, for it is engagement in a divinely rational communication.
That does not mean that Revelation is the communication of pro-positional ideas or concepts already blocked out in propositional form, for what is communicated is God himself, God as Truth, Truth as the Being of God in his revelation. This is Truth not first in noetic form, but truth as ontic Reality, Truth in itself, and only on that ground is it noetic truth for us and in our knowing of it. This noetic truth which belongs to our theological statements is only truth as it derives from and rests in the ontic truth of God’s self-objectification for us, and self-giving to us in the revelation of himself—it is truth that has an ontological depth of objectivity in the very Being and Nature of God-in-his-Word. This is the aspect of Barth’s teaching which was so strongly affected by his studies of Anselm as well as Calvin.
If we look back at these three aspects of Barth’s understanding of the self-revelation of God through his Word, and ask what he means by theology, we must say that for him theology is a thinking from a centre in God, deriving from his active communication of himself in the form of personal Being and Truth, and pointing back to him as the goal of all true human thinking and knowing. While theology necessarily involves two poles of thought, God and man, for it is man who thinks and man who knows, it is not a thinking and knowing from a centre in man himself but from a centre in God. It is man’s objective thinking of a Truth that is independent of him and is yet communicated to him. Theology is correct and true thinking when its movement corresponds to the movement of the Truth itself, and is a thinking in accordance with it, a thinking that follows its activity, thinking that is obedient to its proper object, the Lord God.
We may say, then, that theo-logy is logos of God in a threefold sense of logos. Primarily we are concerned here with the Logos of God that is his own eternal Word and Son, the ground and source of all our human thinking and knowing. But this Logos has become flesh in Jesus Christ, for in him God has revealed and communicated himself to us within the objectivities of our existence in time and space, in creaturely and historical being, and hence in Jesus Christ God has objectified himself for us and given himself to our knowing and understanding. Yet Logos, in this second sense as the object of our knowing, remains the Lord, indissolubly Subject, who encounters us as Truth to be known only in so far as he encounters us as the very Being of God in Person; who meets us within the objectivities of our world which he has assumed for his self-revealing in Jesus Christ, in such a way that he remains the Lord, transcendent to all these objectivities, so objective that we can never master him in his objectivity and subdue him to some form of our own subjectivity in knowing or understanding him, but can only know him as we serve him and are obedient to the Truth. But theology includes a third sense of logos, in which it refers to our way of knowing and understanding the Truth of God in accordance with the way in which he has objectified himself for us in Jesus Christ. Thus theology is an activity of our reason in accordance with the nature of its proper object, God-in-his-Word, or God-in-his-revelation, in Jesus Christ. Theology is critical and positive activity in which we build up our knowledge of God from his Word which he gives as the object of our knowledge, and in which we test our knowing to make sure, as far as we can, that our noetic logos corresponds to the ontic logos in that Word. Thus theology operates with a mode of rationality that is required of us from the side of the object, and proceeds positively and critically in accordance with the way that the Word has taken in his self-communication to us.
We speak of that concretely when we speak of Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, for he is the concrete act of God in his revelation, and therefore the peculiar object of our knowing that distinguishes theology from every other knowledge or science. He is the One who encounters as the very Being of God come to man within the actualities of man’s own existence and life and gives him knowledge and understanding of God.
As such Jesus Christ is the Way, as well as the Truth and the Life, who will be known according to the way God has taken with us in him, the way of revelation and reconciliation within humanity and history. Theological thought, therefore, cannot take a way of its own choosing or wander arbitrarily across country, but must keep to the way of the Truth, for that is the Way of Life. Theological thinking is historical thinking, not thinking about any kind of history or about history in general, but thinking that is a thinking out of this concrete centre in all history, Jesus Christ. It is through faithfulness to this Truth become historical event, to this historical event backed up by all the objective reality of the Being of God, that theology is theology.
Jesus Christ is the Truth as well as the Way and the Life, and therefore we encounter him in such a way that our thought is critically differentiated from other thought, from thought about other objects. Theological thinking is thinking that learns to distinguish truth from falsehood, because it operates with criteria and basic forms of rationality that it derives from the nature of its object. In so far as it is obedient to the nature of this Truth, it allows itself to be questioned by it, and allows all else that it may have claimed to know or may have claimed to be true, all its prior understanding, to be called into question, sifted and brought into conformity with the Truth as it is in Jesus Christ. There can be no neutrality here, for in obedience to the Truth of God in Jesus Christ theology is concerned with concrete and positive truth that must be articulated correctly, and therefore humbly in accordance with the nature of the Truth himself.
Jesus Christ is the Life, as well as the Way and the Truth, for this Truth is Truth in the form of personal Being, and to know this Truth is to know it in a corresponding form of personal being, in a following of Christ, in discipleship, in a renunciation of ourselves and taking up of his Cross, and in union with him. Theological thinking is thus part of man’s actual salvation, for it is thinking of the Life that is the actual salvation and liberty of the man who knows and believes. Theological thinking is therefore a practical type of thinking, in which our being and action are involved and not just our minds or our thought. Theology can never be pursued in contemplative abstraction from the concrete acts of God in Jesus Christ for our salvation. It is thinking in responsibility, thinking in which we have to give an account to God for our lives and beings and actions.
Thus theological thinking that involves the two poles of thought, God and man, and is yet a thinking from a centre in God, that is thinking from out of a centre in the concrete action of God in Jesus Christ, as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, is essentially thinking within the Church. The Church is the realm created in the midst of human existence and history by the self-revelation of God, the area in the midst of all our other knowledge where God is known in accordance with his revealing and saving acts, where God is known as Subject, and is therefore worshipped and loved and obeyed as the Lord of all our human ways and works and thoughts. The Church is not the society of individuals who band themselves voluntarily together through a common interest in Jesus Christ, but it is a divine institution, the creation of the divine decision and election, of the divine love to give himself to men and to share with them his own divine life and love, and so to share with them knowledge of himself. Because the Church is a divine institution it is not governed by an ideology, some self-interpretation, a controlled and systematically worked out truth of its own historical existence and actuality: rather is it governed by the Word of God, and through obedient conformity to that Word. Theology is thus an essential part of the Church’s life, in which it questions its own obedience and tests its conformity and seeks unceasingly to live not out of itself, but out of God in his revelation; not out of what it can think out for itself, but out of what it can hear from God and think into its life and being in history. Theology is part of the Church’s humble worship of God, worshipping with its mind as well as with its body, an act of repentant humility, an act of thankful enjoyment of God, an act of the glorification of God.
Theology has two sides to it. On the one hand, it is an act of repentance, in which it puts to itself critical questions, to test its preaching of God’s Word, to sift its understanding of the Truth, to see whether it is in harmony with what God reveals of himself through his Word, and so to distinguish what is genuinely heard from what is an artificial product of man’s own. That is the scientific task of dogmatics. On the other hand, it is an act of worship, in which it seeks understanding of God, in which it not only travels the road which the Word of God has taken from God to man, but travels the road from man back to God, in order to find in God the goal of all human thinking as well as its source. Theology is a lifting up of the heart unto the Lord, a worshipping of God with the mind, in which we seek understanding of God in the midst of our faith that we may enjoy him and serve him in his Truth. That is the doxological task of dogmatics.
3. Theology and Secular Knowledge
Theology that takes its task seriously as rational thinking cannot escape encounter with philosophy and natural science, for theology does not operate in a realm all of its own, but in the same realm of human thinking where philosophy and all the positive sciences are at work. Just because it is human thinking concerned with the subject-object relationship, like every other form of human thinking, theology necessarily shares with every other form of human thinking certain important problems and questions which it must not avoid. That does not mean that theology must give up its own peculiar nature, for it can no more do that than give up its own proper object—it would be just as foolish to ask physics or biology to move into some general realm of thought and to detach its thinking from its own proper object or field of investigation. But it does mean that theology must operate with human thought and speech as its instruments, and must take seriously the laws and possibilities and limits of human thought and speech within which every science operates and which it is the business of philosophy to clarify as it seeks to fulfil its own task in developing its understanding of the world of being and idea. On the other hand, because theology has problems that overlap with philosophy and other sciences, it must subject itself to rigorous control and the discipline of self-critical revision in order to ensure that it is really being good theology, and not some debased brand of theology that confuses its task and its subject-matter with those of philosophy or some science of nature. Thus, while recognizing its own peculiar nature, and pursuing it with unceasing vigilance and exacting criticism, it must think out its connexion with philosophy and natural science and make clear its distinction from them.
This was one of the main questions Barth found he had to answer, particularly when he began to move from his earlier dialectical thinking into more positive thinking in the construction of a dogmatics. It became even more acute when he had completed his first attempt at what he called Christian Dogmatics and studied it in the light of the criticism it met from his colleagues and opponents and the even stronger criticism it met from himself when he read it again in print. That is the period that follows closely upon the republication of these essays on Theology and Church in 1928. He set himself therefore to clarify his understanding of the essential nature and method of theological activity in the light of its own proper object and in distinction from knowledge beyond the limits imposed on theology by its object. As Barth saw it, this involved for theology a philosophical problem and a scientific problem.
(a) The philosophical problem
Both theology and philosophy are concerned with the subject-object relationship, but whereas theological thinking is bound to a concrete object and moves in a direction chosen for it by the activity of its object, God-in-his-Word, philosophy is not so bound to a concrete object, and is in a position to move more freely in any direction that its own reflection upon man’s existence and actuality may lead it. It is incumbent upon theology to clarify the way in which its thinking overlaps with that of philosophy, and the way in which its thinking is distinct from that of philosophy. An examination of the history of philosophy shows its fundamental dialectic to be concerned with a constant tension between realism and idealism. But that is also the dialectic in which theology engages in its movement between the given object and thought about the object, and therefore it must be in this dialectic that the relevance of philosophical thinking for theology is to be found.
In the first place, then, theology must face the critical questions posed by philosophy as to objectivity, givenness, or reality—that is the problem of realism. Classical realism holds that all our knowledge arises out of actual experience of a given reality, but it also admits that this involves an outward and an inward experience, an objective and a subjective givenness. How, then, are we to distinguish the independent objective reality from our experience of it, especially from our inward subjective experience of it? That is the question that a realist theology must face. It takes as its fundamental proposition that God is, and so affirms that God has reality independently of our knowledge of him. As Anselm expressed it, it is one thing to say that something exists in the understanding, and another thing to understand that it exists. But how in point of fact are we to distinguish the two? How do we know that the God whom we know in our minds has existence apart from our mental knowledge of him, that ‘God’ is anything more than an empty ‘idea’ in our minds?
That problem is made all the more acute when we remember that the God we claim to know is not some God in himself, but God who is known in his Word, the God who reveals himself within the concrete objectivities and actualities of our human and historical existence; that is, within the Church of Jesus Christ on earth. How are we to distinguish God from the outward experience of these concrete objectivities in the I-Thou encounter we have with other people, or in the concrete objectivities of history? Theological realism insists that God is given to me in the actualities of my experience in the form of a likeness to himself, in the realm of being which I have in nature and history, and that he meets me in my neighbour and within the subject-subject encounter of person to person in the Christian Church. But how am I to distinguish God himself from these external objectivities through which he reveals himself to me? And if I hold that God is the source of all Being, and that all other being derives from him and participates in him, and if therefore I think that in virtue of the fact that I exist or have being I am necessarily in encounter with the Being of God, how can I distinguish him from the actualities with which my existence is necessarily bound up? How can I distinguish God from necessity or from fate or from nature, or from the concrete historical existence which I share and from which I cannot escape? How can I distinguish a genuine theological realism from a philosophical realism, or reflection about the living God from reflection upon being in general?
These questions are sufficient to show that realism is a very serious issue for theology, but theology has its counter-questions to ask, says Barth. The most fundamental of them is whether theological realism takes into consideration the fact that the grace of God contradicts us. It is on this ground, that grace opposes sinful man, and objects to his sin, on the ground of a contradiction between the revelation of God and the activity of man, that we can distinguish the objectively given reality of God-in-his-Word from our own subjective states, but also from the other objectivities we encounter in our experience of the world around us. Classical theological realism operates with a basic, naïve conviction that we are able to read knowledge of God off what is given to us in our experience because we stand in relation to him by virtue of the fact that we exist. But when we actually know God through his Word a very different conviction arises, for here a light shines into our darkness, and something quite new is revealed to us which does not just reinforce what we already know, but rather calls it in question. This new knowledge comes as grace that forgives and judges us, and which we cannot just assimilate into our existence, for it lays claim upon us and summons us to encounter the independent objective reality of the living God, the Creator and Redeemer.
Concretely this is what happens when we meet God in Jesus Christ and know him as Lord by the power of the Spirit. It is in that encounter that we learn that the objective act of God upon us in the freedom of his Spirit is to be distinguished from our inward subjective conditions, and that the God who meets us face to face in Jesus Christ is not just nature, or history, or the actuality of our existence with which we are bound up and from which we cannot escape, but a living God who really comes to us and acts upon us in the midst of all the other actualities and objectivities of our historical and natural existence. In other words, here we are faced with a deeper and more fundamental objectivity, with the ultimate objectivity of the Lord God, and therefore it is here that theology is both basically realist and yet to be distinguished from every form of philosophical realism.
In the second place, however, theology must face the critical question posed by philosophy as to the adequacy of its thought to its proper object—that is the question of truth, which gives rise to the problem of idealism. This is the question that seeks to penetrate behind the given, the finite, the objectifiable, and behind all actuality to its ultimate validation or presupposition. Idealist thinking, says Barth, has a negative critical side, and a positive speculative side. On the one hand, it questions the basic assumption of realism, inquires into the reliability of the correlation between subject and object, and reveals the limits within which realist thinking can operate. It refracts or breaks the movement of realist thinking, and so makes it point beyond itself to its object. This critical operation both reminds us of the inadequacy of our human thought-forms and calls for a greater and more exacting adequacy. But idealist thinking has another speculative side, in which it poses as the criterion of reality and exalts itself over against pure being. Idealism of this sort is the self-reflection of man’s spirit over against nature, the discovery of the creative reason as the source of the correlation between subject and object.
Idealist thinking, at least in its critical form, is a necessary element in theological thinking, for whenever there is serious thinking about God, a distinction must be drawn between the givenness of God and the givenness of all other being. That is the relevance of mysticism or of the via negativa even for the classical realism of the Middle Ages, for a realist theology requires a powerful element of idealism in order to be genuinely realist. Is the idealist distinction between ‘the given’ and ‘the not-given’ not necessary for a proper understanding of the difference between divine revelation and all other knowledge that claims to be knowledge of God? And just because in theology we are engaged in human thinking about God, and with the articulation of knowledge of God in human thought-forms, must we not ask the question as to the adequacy of these thought-forms to God? Does not idealist thinking teach us that the best of our thought-forms can only point beyond to the ultimate reality of God which cannot be captured and formulated within the four corners of our human concepts and propositions? That is why idealism is the necessary antidote to all thorough-going realism, for it prevents realist thinking from confounding God with the actualities of our existence, with nature, or history, or necessity.
But may not idealism itself prove the greater danger, especially when it refuses to rest content with the humble critical refraction of our thinking, but insists on making out of the reason itself the criterion of truth, and so exalting itself above God? Is not the danger of idealist thinking in theology that it may lead to the substitution of ideology for genuine theology, a system of self-sufficient truth for an activity of human thinking that points away from itself to the object of its knowledge as the sole source and ground of truth, and as the Truth of God? Hence here, too, theology has its counter-questions to ask of idealist thinking in theology.
The fundamental question we have to ask is directed to the idealist question posed not from the side of the object but from the side of the subject. Does the attempt to reach out beyond all the dialectical antitheses and antinomies of human thought to an ultimate synthesis ever really get outside the circle of its own subjectivity, ever really get beyond the human subject from which it started? Does it not, after all, confound God with the conclusion to its own argument or with the goal of its own upward movement of thought? Is it not in the end projecting its own thought into the infinite and calling it God?
The fundamental question theology must put to the idealist is whether he is ready to let God be God, and therefore ready to let knowledge of God be grounded in God’s own self-revelation, and the establishment of the truth of that knowledge be God’s act and not man’s. In other words, the question which theology must pose over against idealism is the question directed from justification by the grace of God alone to every Pelagian or semi-Pelagian attempt on the part of the human reason to be able to acquire knowledge of God or at least to be able to test and establish the truth of revelation on its own ground. If God is really God, then knowledge of him must be by way of humble obedience, by way of listening to him and serving his Word, and yielding our minds to the direction of his Truth. God is God, and not our idea of God, and therefore all our ideas of him have to be called in question by the very critical question from which idealist thinking takes its rise. And yet here, theology must beware lest it is after all engaging not in theological thinking, but in some form of philosophical idealism itself, for the critical question theology directs does not arise out of any independent rational movement of its own, but is forced upon it by the object of its knowledge, and by the nature of the objectivity of the object, the nature of God who gives himself to us in sheer grace and remains sovereignly free in his transcendent Lordship over all our thoughts of him and over all our formulations of the understanding he gives us of himself in his Word.
The problems posed by philosophical realism and idealism must be taken seriously by theology, but they are questions that theology must learn to raise in its own way and in the closest relation to its own proper object. But the discussion with philosophy shows theology that it must take seriously both poles of its thinking, truth and actuality, thought and being, the knowing subject and the object known. Theology learns that there can be a one-sided realist theology which is tempted to confound God with nature, and there can be a one-sided idealist theology which is tempted to confound God with the reason. Inevitably, therefore, the dialectic between these two counter-movements will throw up the correctives from either side which the other side needs. In such a situation it is possible that a theology may be more realist in orientation and still be theology and another may be more idealist in orientation and still be theology—rather than some species of philosophy or ideology.
But a good theology cannot rest content with that sort of dialectic; rather has it to think more concretely out of the depths of its own concern, and engage in a more material mode of thinking of the tensions between the knowing subject and its given object that is governed by the nature of its subject-matter. Theology just because it is theology must learn to distinguish its dialectic from all philosophical forms of the dialectic between subject and object. All philosophy worthy of the name seeks in some way to reach a unitary understanding of the universe, and so to transcend the dialectic between realism and idealism. But whether it is realistically or idealistically slanted, whether it erects a synthesis from the side of being or from the side of the reason, it is fundamentally a movement from man toward God, and claims in the last analysis to be able to say an ultimate word or at least to aim at an ultimate word that transcends the antitheses and contradictions revealed within human existence. But theology as a thinking that takes its rise from a centre in God and not from a centre in man, comes from the very point (from God) which philosophy hopes to reach. There is thus an inescapable tension between the essential intention of theological thought and the essential intention of philosophical thought, for they move in opposite directions.
In so far as philosophy is engaged in unitary or synthetic thinking theology has no quarrel with it, but can only learn from it and cooperate with it. But if philosophy insists on going further, in identifying its synthesis with God, in claiming the conclusion of its argument to be the ultimate reality, in confounding its own word projected above the tensions of human existence with the Word of God, that is, in so far as philosophy turns itself into a theosophy, then theology cannot but do battle with it. Theology that is interpretation of the Word of God spoken to human existence cannot allow the place and authority of that Word to be usurped by a word of man that derives from his own reflection upon the problems of human existence. But may not the counter-questions theology poses to every philosophy that is tempted to become a theosophy help to keep philosophy pure, help it to become self-critical, and so to be genuine philosophy that is aware of the limits of human thinking, and will not ascribe to itself the ability to transcend itself?
Theology’s answer to the problems posed by philosophy is not only one derived from the essential form of theo-logical thinking as distinct from every ideo-logical thinking, but one that must be derived from the basic content of theological knowledge and one that reposes upon the actuality and truth of its own object, God in his revelation. In other words, the answer that theology must give is one that reposes upon God’s decision to give himself to man as the object of his knowledge and upon the content of that gift, for they establish the possibility and determine the reality of all theological thinking. Looked at from one aspect this is the epistemological significance of election—which stands for the fact that theology does not move in a direction of its own choosing, but only in the way God has chosen for it, and that therefore it has its necessity outside of itself, in God. This means that theology by its very nature must renounce any claim to possess truth in its own theological statements, for those theological statements are only truthful when they point away from themselves to the one Truth of God as their absolute prius and ground. Looked at from another aspect this is the epistemological significance of the Incarnation, for Jesus Christ himself is the Way and the Truth and the Life, and theological thinking is thinking grounded in the objectivity of the concrete act of God in him, and is thinking that is wholly determined by its object, God become man, the Word made flesh, full of grace and truth.
Nevertheless, while theology must be concerned with its own proper object, and only within the bounds imposed by that object take up the problems posed by philosophical realism and idealism, it must seek to articulate its knowledge within the same realm of thinking that is occupied by philosophy and every other science. Hence it cannot but make use of the forms of thought and speech which it finds in that realm. Its task will be to maintain throughout its own proper concern and not allow it to be subordinated to ways of thinking that are not appropriate to its proper object, and therefore it must shape the forms of thought and speech which it inherits into tools that will really serve its specifically theological purpose.
This is a problem of which Barth is acutely aware. On the one hand, it has led him to grasp more profoundly the objectivity of the Word and to move over from an idealist into a fundamentally realist theology, but on the other hand, it has helped Barth to find a way of articulating his realist understanding of the Word of God within the essentially dynamic and critico-idealist style of modernity, and yet in such a way that it breaks through the framework of every form of thinking in its determined obedience to follow the way that the Word of God has actually taken in Jesus Christ in revelation and reconciliation. His contribution to the history of theology must be measured by the success of his critique of the one-sidedly realist theology of the Middle Ages, and the one-sidedly idealist theology of modern Protestantism, and by the extent to which he has learned from both in articulating a constructive dogmatics that presses into the objective unity of all Christian theology and radically calls in question the deviations from that unity grounded in the divine self-revelation in Jesus Christ.
(b) The scientific problem
The discussion between theology and philosophy serves to drive theology back upon its proper object; otherwise it betrays itself and loses its own basic concern. But if it is driven back upon its object and learns to think out its problems strictly from within the limits and restrictions to thinking laid down by the nature of its object, and develops a rational method in accordance with the nature of its object, then is not theological activity methodologically more like that of an exact science than of philosophy? If that is so, then theology must clarify its own procedure over against the other sciences which operate within the same realm of human thinking as it does, especially where that thinking takes a strictly a posteriori form. Our concern here is not to trace out the relations between the doctrines of the Christian faith, as they are given constructive form in Barth’s theology, with the results of modern scientific research, but rather to consider the problem of scientific method as it is posed from the side of empirical science, and to discern how theology takes up that problem on its own ground and works it out in its own way in accordance with the requirements of its own object.
There can be no doubt that theology and natural science overlap in so far as the critical reflection of both takes place within space and time, and within the world of concrete objectivity in nature and history, and yet they differ both in regard to the source of their knowledge and the nature of their object. Theology, as we have seen, is essentially a thinking from a centre in God and not from a centre in man, nevertheless it is not thinking of some ‘God in himself’, but of a God who has revealed himself to man within the same sphere of actuality to which he belongs, and therefore within the world of concrete objectivities in nature and history accessible to man’s observation and reflection. That is the actuality which natural science investigates, but it observes it and reflects upon it as purely contingent existence that is to be known only in its phenomenology and not in its ontology. Natural science by its very nature confines itself to the investigation of phenomena. Theology operates within that same area, but it is concerned with the living God who reveals himself in the midst of phenomenal objectivity as the Creator and Lord of it all and as the ground of its being and reality. Theology is not concerned with the phenomena as such, but with the central relation of it all to God, and is a form of thinking that derives from God’s Word and follows the movement of God’s Word in its creative and redemptive operation—only incidentally, therefore, does it concern itself with the knowledge of phenomena as such, derived from empirical study alone. In the doctrine of man, for example, it is not concerned as theology with what medical science, with what physiology or chemistry, have to say about him, for it is concerned about the central relation of man to God which constitutes his reality as man, that is his being a child of God; but what it has to say here on the border of what empirical science discovers of ‘the phenomena of the human’, as Barth speaks of it, does illuminate the world of man within which alone empirical science is pursued. That does not mean that theology can offer any information of the kind that is assimilable to the knowledge acquired by natural science or that is therefore of any use to it in its empirical activity, although it may serve to remind man of the limits and boundaries of his existence and of his knowledge, and help him to restrict his reflections within the limits set by empirical approach to his object, that is, help him to retain strict objectivity as empirical science.
Because theology operates with the Word of God that has become flesh within the world of space and time, it must recognize that there is an aspect of its object that is open to empirical observation and reflection—and to that extent it must reckon on the justice of historico-critical investigation and its relevance to the concern of theology. But theology is concerned with the Word become flesh, with the activity of God in space and time, and therefore it is concerned with these concrete objectivities that are necessarily open to empirical and critical observation only in their relation to the ultimate objectivity of God who has come to us in their midst to reveal himself to us and reconcile us to himself. It is that fact that differentiates theological science so radically from natural science, for it is concerned with the outward objectivities of space and time as the form in which it encounters the Object of knowledge who is indissolubly Subject, and which it only knows as Object in so far as it knows it as Subject—although, of course, it does not know the Subject except so far as he makes himself Object of human knowledge within the realm of man’s nature and existence.
It is this essential and profound polarity of its given object—which Barth calls its primary and secondary objectivity—that distinguishes theological knowledge from every other kind of knowledge or science. This differentiation, however, is a scientific difference, that is, a difference arising out of precise and exact behaviour in accordance with the nature of its proper object. Thus theology differs from natural science both in regard to the direction and source of its knowledge and in regard to the nature of its object, but within that difference it is still true that methodologically theology stands closer to the empirical sciences than to philosophy, and is indeed better described as theological science than as sacred philosophy.
The closeness between theological science and natural science becomes apparent when we note the formal points which they have in common, and the scientific way in which theology develops its own peculiar method.
Barth notes three main points which theological and empirical science have in common, over against philosophy.
(a) They do not operate with a world-view or necessarily develop a cosmology. By their very dedication to their object, they renounce all prior understandings of the universe, and refuse to construct a cosmological interpretation which will serve as a guide to further investigation. Natural science confines itself strictly to phenomena, and refuses to mix its studies up with philosophy, although, of course, it may well listen to philosophical questions in so far as they help it to get free from presuppositions and so help it toward purer objectivity. Theology likewise is dedicated to its proper object, and it is precisely its attachment to its object that detaches it from all presuppositions arising from philosophy or tradition or any other source—not, of course, that the theologian, or the natural scientist, is ever without these or can ever ultimately escape them, but that methodological renunciation of presuppositions (except the one presupposition of its object) is scientifically demanded of it. It is for that reason that neither theological nor empirical science can properly lead to or result in cosmological constructions, or speculative ontologies of the universe.
(b) Both theological science and empirical science recognize the centrality of man in the cosmos—both recognize that they are human endeavours, aspects of human thinking and research, and cannot transcend the human correlate in that activity. Thus inevitably and practically empirical science describes the cosmos as the cosmos of man, the cosmos of human observation and inference, knowledge of which is limited accordingly. For theology, too, the cosmos has an anthropocentric orientation, not because the starting-point of man’s knowledge is from man himself, and not simply because he can engage only in human thinking, but because his thinking takes its rise from and is determined by the Word of God which is addressed to man in the midst of the cosmos. Theology cannot and must not try to, but does not need to, usurp God’s standpoint, for God has come to give man knowledge both of God and man himself from within the sphere accessible to and knowable by man, who may thus have knowledge of God without renouncing his human standpoint. Indeed, it is because God addresses his Word to man in the world, and loves the world which he has made, that theology looks in the direction of the address and love of God—toward the world, as well as toward God. Only because it must travel with the Word the road from God to man in the world, does it and may it travel the road from man in the world to God as the goal of all its knowledge.
(c) Theological science and empirical science resemble one another in that both recognize two fundamentally distinct realms, the realm of the observable and objectifiable, and the realm beyond, which is outside the range of human observation and comprehension. Theology calls these heaven and earth, Barth says, but although empirical science uses different language, it no less than theology respects the difference between heaven and earth; that is to say, it respects the limited range of human observation, investigation, and description, and therefore also reckons with the realm of what is inaccessible to man. As exact science it cannot deny that realm, but acknowledges it at least as the frontier of its knowledge, where it calls a halt precisely in order to be exact science. Therefore, as empirical science, it maintains a respectful silence about what lies on the other side of its frontier, and does not seek to extend its method (built up in correlation with the observable and objectifiable) beyond its range and so to corrupt it.
With the exact sciences that maintain strict scientific faithfulness theological science can engage in fruitful discussion, but it is also the responsibility of theology to take cognizance of what these other sciences have to teach especially about the phenomena of the human or the characteristics of man as a creature, and to relate to it its own knowledge of the reality of man derived from the Word of God; for it is precisely to this man, with his scientific endeavours that the Word of God is addressed, and upon the whole of his existence that it lays the claim of the divine grace.
The methodological closeness of theology to empirical science is seen at a deeper level in the essentially scientific way in which it develops its method, for it does not bring to its task a method that it has already thought out or acquired, but elaborates a method only in its actualization of knowledge. Neither theological science nor empirical science knows a method in abstraction from the material content of its actual subject-matter. Thus the questions theology asks are not correlated with the subject but with the object. If it brings questions to its object, it is only in order that they may themselves be called in question by the object and be restated in accordance with the nature of the object. They are questions designed to let the object declare itself, and so are framed as questions that the object by its nature puts to the inquirer. In so far as they are thus correlated with the subject they are acts of self-criticism designed to clear away all artificiality and to open a way for seeing what is actually there and for learning what the objective reality has to disclose to us unhindered and undistorted, as far as possible, by any prior understanding on the part of the subject undertaking the inquiry. The questions that are put are only designed by the theologian or the scientist in order to let himself be told what he cannot tell himself and must genuinely learn. For theology this kind of inquiry is an act of repentant humility.
Of course, in the nature of the case, the kind of inquiry in which theology engages face to face with its object will differ from the kind of inquiry in which natural science engages face to face with its object, for the nature of object in each case demands that difference as a part of its scientific obedience. Natural science is concerned with creaturely objects, and, as a rule, with mute objects, so that although we speak here of letting the object disclose itself and yield to us knowledge of it, that is a way of insisting upon objectivity in investigation. But the kind of question the scientist has to put to these objects to make them ‘talk’ or yield their secrets are scientific experiments in which he compels them to reveal themselves. Controlled experiment is the kind of inquiry appropriate to inanimate creaturely objects, but the kind of inquiry appropriate to other human beings will pass beyond that to a kind which allows the other actively and willingly to reveal himself as one human person to another. The kind of inquiry that theology directs toward God must, scientifically, be appropriate to the nature of God before whom I am questioned before I begin to ask questions, whom I can know only as I am known by him, and knowledge of whom I can articulate only as he gives himself to me to be known. In other words, the kind of inquiry proper to theological science is prayer, inquiry which we address to God as the Truth in order that we may listen to what he tells us of himself, and may understand it only under his illumination of our minds. It is because the object of theological knowledge confronts us always as Subject, and indeed as absolute Subject, as the Lord God, that prayer is the scientifically correct mode of inquiry, for it is the mode of inquiry that corresponds to God’s nature as man’s Creator and Redeemer.
We may expound this relation between theology and exact science in another way. All scientific activity is one in which the reason acts strictly and precisely in accordance with the nature of its object, and so lets the object prescribe for it both the limits within which it is to be known and the mode of rationality that is to be adopted toward it. But for that reason it also lets the nature of the object determine the kind of demonstration appropriate to it. It will not insult the object by trying to subject it to some kind of demonstration that has been developed elsewhere in accordance with the nature of a different kind of object, nor by employing for its investigation external criteria dragged in from some other realm of knowledge. The kind of verification it must scientifically employ is the kind that derives from and is in accord with the actual way in which knowledge has arisen. That is to say, it never seeks to impose an arbitrarily constructed possibility upon the reality it is investigating, but will only argue from the reality to its possibility and within that movement subject its knowledge to critical examination.
This is precisely the way which Barth adopts in scientific dogmatics—as we can see very clearly in his brilliant interpretation of Anselm’s theological method, and in the way in which he has worked out his own epistemology in strict obedience to the nature of the concrete object of theological knowledge, God come to us in Jesus Christ, i.e. in such a way that in all his thinking he really allows God to be God, and refuses to think beyond him or above him. The procedure common to theological science and all other genuine science is one in which the mind of the knower acts in strict conformity to the nature of what is given, and refuses to take up a standing in regard to it prior to actual knowledge or in abstraction from actual knowledge. Scientific knowledge is one in which the reason does not proceed in the light of some inner dialectic of its own, but one that arises out of determination by the object known and derives from the rationality and necessity of that object. In theological knowledge the reason lets itself be determined by the nature of God in his revelation, and adopts a mode of rationality that corresponds with God’s objectifying of himself for man. That is epistemologically the meaning of faith—faith is not in the slightest degree any irrational leap, but a sober commitment to the nature of the given reality, a determination of the reason in accordance with the nature of the object, an orientation of the mind demanded of it in encounter with its unique and incomparable object that is and remains Subject, the Lord God. Faith means that to the self-giving, the self-revealing, and self-communication of God in his Truth there corresponds in man a receiving, an understanding and an appropriation of the Truth, but in such a way that the rationale and necessity of faith do not lie primarily in itself but primarily in the object of faith. Hence theological knowledge is not a scientific explication of the nature of faith, but in faith an explication of understanding of the independent reality known. Theological activity does not proceed in the light of the theologian’s faith, but in the light that comes from the side of that in which he has faith, the self-authenticating and self-revealing reality of God that according to its very nature can be known and understood and substantiated only out of itself.
Barth can speak here of three levels or realms of reality, the realm of actual knowledge, the realm of objectivity that lies behind it and determines it, and the ultimate and primary realm of the Truth of God itself. Scientific theological activity is concerned with all three and with all three together in a compulsive activity. The realm of knowledge is the realm of noetic experience and noetic necessity. Scientific knowledge is concerned with a knowledge that forces itself upon us and to which we cannot but yield in truthful and faithful rational activity, but knowledge is not established so long as we merely remain on the level of noetic necessity, for the necessity in that realm derives from an ontic necessity at its basis in the object. It is only when theological inquiry presses into that deeper level that scientific understanding arises—that is, in a movement of knowledge in which we do not master the object but in which it masters us, in which we reach an ontic rationality in the object of faith and establish as far as we can the necessary relation between that ontic rationality in the object and the noetic rationality in our understanding of it. It is in the critical clarification of that profound objective necessity that theological knowledge claims to be thoroughly and strictly scientific because controlled and determined from the side of what is objectively given.
But scientific theological activity cannot stop there, for the nature of its object will not allow it to do so—it is required to act in conformity to the ultimate objectivity of God that confronts it within the realm of the objectifiable where God has revealed himself to us within space and time, within our existence and history. It is this ultimate objectivity of the Lord God, in which he stands over against all our thinking in the unique manner of the Creator over against the thinking of the creature, that characterizes all genuine theological knowledge and gives it its ultimate differentiation from all other knowledge. Theology would not be scientific, if at this point it drew back, and refused to acknowledge the unique nature of its object, in some false attempt to content itself with an objectivity that is merely like the relative objectivity with which every natural science is concerned, the objectivity of what is given to it in the creaturely world alone. It is this relation of primary objectivity to secondary objectivity that gives theological knowledge its great depth, provides it with its supreme determination, and gives it its great freedom under the sovereign objectivity of the Object that remains the absolute Subject. It is just because theological knowledge is confronted with the Lord God who lays his absolute claims over us that theological thinking can be carried out only in the strictest discipline, in stringent self-criticism and in utter obedience to the object. But because it is the Lord God who confronts us in theological knowledge, he confronts us necessarily as he who is greater than we can conceive, who transcends all our formulations of him, but who nevertheless gives himself to us as the object of our knowledge. Hence, even if our knowing of him is not adequate to his nature, it is not for that reason false, for he has come to us, adapted himself to us, and given himself to us to be known as reality within the actualities of our own being and existence, in Jesus Christ.
This means that the central and pivotal point of all genuine theological knowledge is to be found in Christology, in Jesus Christ in whom God and Man are one Person, in whom the primary objectivity of God meets us within the secondary objectivities of the given. A scientific theology will therefore operate on a Christological basis, for Christology will have critical significance for its inquiry into the understanding of the Truth of God at every point. Because God has once for all revealed himself in Jesus Christ, not in some merely transient fashion, which God leaves behind, and which man then, too, may eventually leave behind, but in such a way that God has for ever bound himself to our humanity in Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ bound us in a relation to him that is creative as well as redeeming. If God in Jesus Christ not only gives us to know something of himself, but gives us himself, if in Jesus Christ we are encountered not only by the Act of God but by the very Being of God in the Act, then we can never think of going behind the back of Jesus Christ in order to know God for that would be equivalent to trying to think beyond and above God himself, and to making ourselves as God. It is Christological thinking that teaches us to let God be God: to know God strictly and only in accordance with the steps he has taken to reveal himself to us, and therefore to test our knowledge of God in accordance with the steps in which knowledge of him has actually arisen and actually arises for us.
Now, if scientific theological knowledge refuses to operate merely within the noetic necessity of our thinking and speaking, but presses into the ontic necessity at the basis of those statements, that is into the inner rationality of the object itself, then it will be concerned to elucidate not only the basic noetic forms of rational theological thinking but the basic ontic forms through which everything is determined, for only in so doing can it establish the necessary relation between its thought and the object of its thought in a proper scientific manner. Hence theological thinking must probe into the inner basic forms and norms of its object as they are revealed in the material content of its thought. In other words, it will not employ any criteria in the testing and establishing of its knowledge in abstraction from its actual content, and will not elaborate any epistemology in abstraction from the full substance of theological knowledge—rather will a correct epistemology emerge, and a proper theological method develop, in the actual process of seeking full understanding of the object of faith and constructing a dogmatics in utter obedience to its object. Strictly speaking, it is only at the end of the work of dogmatics that it will be possible to expound properly an adequate epistemology. And yet, just because theological knowledge is confronted with the primary and ultimate objectivity of God, and must in accordance with its nature and freedom ‘break’ its theological formulations in recognition of their inadequacy and use them in all their noetic and ontic truthfulness in pointing beyond themselves to the one Truth of God, theological knowledge can never come to an end, but is by its very nature, at least for mortals on earth and pilgrims in history, a perpetual inquiry and a perpetual prayer that take place in the interval between the inception of faith and final vision. There will be no possibility therefore of abstracting from the substance of theology some final theological method which can then be wielded magisterially to subdue all doctrines to some rigid pattern, and there will be no possibility of reaching final solutions to theological problems—true prayer to the living God is unceasing, and true theological inquiry is unceasing worship and adoration. But this would, Barth insists, be prayer and worship without faith in the hearing of prayer and without trust in the grace and truth of God if theological thinking in the prosecution of its inquiry were not entirely certain of its object, and therefore ready to pursue its task in reliance upon the creative and normative activity of the object of its knowledge.
Theological certainty is pivoted upon the object, never pivoted upon the subject of the knower but because it looks for justification not at its own hands, nor on the ground of its own activity, but solely at the hands of God and solely on the grounds of his grace, it will be no less but even more ready to venture forth at its own level with absolute confidence and in its unconditional demands for precise doctrinal formulation. Thus when theological activity engages in self-critical questioning and in acknowledgement of the inadequacy of its own formulations of the Truth, that is not because it engages in doubt or because it is sceptical of its function, but on the contrary because its absolute certainty reposing upon the object requires of it humility and repentance. It is this certainty of the object that lets the theologian know that for all the questionableness and inadequacy of his own human employment of human forms of thought and speech, his theological understanding is not for that reason false, for the truth of his thinking stands or falls with its relation to the object, and derives not from the truth of itself but from the truth in the object towards which it points. By claiming truth in itself, it would become false, for it would arrogate to itself an ontic necessity and truth that belong only to the object, and so would betray its theological thinking into some form of ideological interpretation or speculation, or confound its own objective statements with the independent objectivity of the Truth of God. The truth of theological statements is linked with the fact that considered in themselves they have no truth of their own, but bear witness to the one Truth of God which is their sole justification and substantiation.
When we ask what the contribution of Karl Barth is, through a constructive dogmatics built up in this scientific manner, we may answer by drawing parallels between his work and that of Albert Einstein and Nils Bohr in the realm of pure natural science. If Einstein’s immense contribution lies in the fact that he has penetrated down into the deep rationality of the universe of nature and laid bare its fundamental simplicities in a logical economy that is profoundly illuminating for the whole world of natural science and immensely fertile in the solving of many of its most difficult problems, and if in doing that Einstein’s thinking involves the establishing of the age-old inquiry of science more securely on its proper axis in spite of the revolutionary effects of his theory of relativity, then mutatis mutandis, that, it can be said, is also the contribution of Karl Barth in the realm of theological science. For on the one hand he has penetrated into the deep objective rationality of theological knowledge and laid bare its basic simplicities which are proving immensely fertile throughout the whole realm of theological inquiry, and at the same time has through that attainment of a fundamental, theological economy established the catholic faith of the whole Church on a foundation that cuts across the theologies of East and West, Roman and Evangelical thinking, and presses in the most startling way towards a unitary understanding of the historic faith of the Christian Church in its one Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
If the contribution of Nils Bohr in the realm of physics can be said to lie in the construction of an interpretation of nuclear activity that calls for a logical reconstruction of classical physics and mechanics, and so opens up in an astonishingly new way the relation of logic to being or rather of being to logic, so it must be said that the work of Karl Barth calls for a radical reconstruction both of Mediaeval and Neo-Protestant thought-forms, for only in breaking through these historic ways of thinking can we carry out the scientific task of theology in seeking to let our minds be utterly obedient and faithful to what is revealed from the side of the objectively given. Here there opens up a way of articulating theology within the essentially a posteriori and dynamic mode of modern thinking that is yet basically realist, in the sense that it is wholly devoted to its object, and will have nothing to do with the elaboration either of an existentialist ideology or an independent ontology. It will take generations to measure the significance of Barth’s Herculean efforts in positive theology, but it is already clear that the whole of future theological thinking will have to reckon with what he has laid bare in the inner structure of catholic and evangelical doctrine, and with the central and dominant significance for all theological thinking he has uncovered in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We have examined and traced out the road travelled by Barth in his break-away from the subjective-idealist theology of Neo-Protestantism to positive, catholic, and evangelical dogmatics conceived and elaborated in the scientific manner. It is through looking at Barth’s starting-point as well as at the goal of his thinking that we can appreciate the place and significance of the essays collected and published in this volume. They range from an early review-article of 1920 on the relation of Christianity to history to an essay on the critical bearing of Roman Catholicism on the Protestant Church of 1928. In them we see Barth listening to criticism from unusual sources, in an open-hearted readiness to let himself, and evangelical theology in which he stands, be questioned down to the bed rock in order to determine its foundations, but in them, too, we see Barth wrestling with the inheritance of Protestant theology, from the Reformation and from the nineteenth century particularly, and rethinking what he has learned from his own esteemed theological teachers like Wilhelm Herrmann, in order to break a way through their frame of thinking, and to let the positive Word of God speak again in its native force and creative impact. This is essentially the stage of his thought when he engaged in stringent dialectical thinking in order to let the opposite poles of thought have freedom of movement, if only to get away from the way in which all the great distinctive differences between God and man had been so planed down that the line ran from one to the other in a gentle declivity or a gentle ascent, depending on the direction one travelled. The more cleanly that was done, the more deeply he penetrated into the real relations of God and man, the more he was forced to abandon his dialectical thinking, which for all its negatives concealed ambiguous positives, and to work out openly on the basis of the Word of God a positive understanding of the way from God to man and of the corresponding way from man to God. All the way through one can see struggling together his concern for a biblically grounded theology which he inherited from Calvin and his concern to think it out in the wealth of modern thought which he inherited from Schleiermacher—the interest in biblical exegesis and the interest in culture hold him in a tight grasp, and if he finds that culture must be searched to its foundations by biblico-theological criticism it is not that he is in any sense a Philistine or depreciates the developments of history, but rather the reverse, and if he insists on a theological exegesis and manifests his discontent with biblical scholars who will go no further than elucidating the text from historico-critical and grammatical or perhaps from phenomenological standpoints alone, it is not that he is an opponent of careful Old Testament or New Testament scholarship, but that he wants this scholarship to do its proper work in penetrating into the inner logic of the biblical teaching and so laying bare the Word in the words.
This becomes his chief theological concern, to get at the significance of the Word of God, and of a theology of the Word as distinct from a theology that is only a reflection upon faith. Here it is perhaps the essay on the place of the Word in modern theology from Schleiermacher to Ritschl that is most revealing. On the one hand, he wants to distinguish the Word of God from history—that is an interest of the first essay in the volume which reveals the enlightening influence upon Barth of Overbeck’s critique of historical Christianity, as the history of the subordination of the supernatural Kingdom of Christ to the history of man’s achievements and failures. And yet while Barth insists on sharpening the distinction here it is evident that he will have nothing to do with a Word of God that is not directed to the concrete existence and historical life of man. But the awe for history, which had almost clothed it with the aura of divinity, had to be punctured in order that sober historical reflection might play its part as a servant of the creative Word of God and not the part of its gaoler. On the other hand, Barth wants to distinguish the Word of God from the word that man can speak to himself in the depths of his own religious self-consciousness, for theology can make no real claim to knowledge until it can distinguish what is objectively given from its subjective conditions and states. No solution to that problem is really possible through elaborating a ‘scientific’ theological pursuit as the historical reflection and philosophical consideration of the history of religious ideas. All this can quickly come under the critique of one as sharp-sighted as Feuerbach, who without much difficulty can point out that it is but a form of man’s reflection upon himself and his own achievements, and is in the end a species of anthropology and not what it claims to be, a theology.
Through study of the teaching of the Reformation, and historical Reformed and Lutheran dogmatics, on the one hand, as is evident from the essays on Lutheran and Reformed theology here, and through a serious grappling with the problems raised by Roman theology and directed at evangelical theology, on the other hand, Barth attempts to clear the ground for a new theology of the Word which carries its own inner rationality, and is to be distinguished from every mysticism and every romantic idealism that is ultimately concerned with wordless experience of God and that requires to borrow from philosophy or science rational forms for its coherent articulation.
But a theology of the Word carries Barth’s thinking into the doctrine of the Church as the sphere within history where that Word is proclaimed and heard, and the community within which understanding of the Word is demanded and built up. Here the theology of the Word is understood as a necessary function of the life of the people of God and of its mission to proclaim Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth and the ends of the ages. The Church lives by the message it preaches, but its preaching of that message has to be tested, to ensure that it is really preaching the Word of God and not its own ideas or opinions. The relation of the Word of God to the ordering of the life and mission of the Church in the world means that theology cannot escape the questions of ethics, but it does mean that it is essentially a theological ethics that is required for the life of the Church in the world.
Once again this involves for Barth a clarification of his doctrine of the Word and of the Church with that of Rome on the one hand and with the claims and self-understanding of secular culture on the other hand. The discussion with the Roman Church carries Barth into a surprising measure of formal agreement with it in the doctrine of the Church, and yet into the most radical disagreement going down to the question of the justification of faith, which Luther called ‘the article of the standing or falling Church’. But in this discussion Barth has to wrestle with the meaning of doctrine and the problem of authority, that is, the significance of dogma in the history and life of the Church. In these pages Barth’s discussion is carried out through a debate with Erik Peterson, a notable Lutheran theologian who became a Roman Catholic and roused considerable debate. For Barth dogmatics arises out of the critical questions that must be put to the task of interpreting the biblical witnesses and thinking their thoughts after them, in order to press it into theological understanding. At the same time dogmatics must engage in a critical examination of the Church’s teaching, and in a testing of old and new formulations of basic ideas and ways of thinking related to the interpretation of the Scriptures. Behind all this it is the function of dogmatics to inquire into the coherence of the historic formulations of the Church, into its decisions, definitions, and dogmas, and to test their basic correspondence with the Word of God, and so to inquire into fundamental ‘dogma’ interpreted as the basic and determining unity of the Church’s faith. This involves Barth in a searching examination of the basic principles which Roman theology employs in the articulation and systematization of its doctrine, and the binding of it to the mind of the historical Church as it is given magisterial definition through the teaching office. Barth’s thinking and writing in this connexion gave rise to the notorious debates that followed upon this period of Barth’s development with leading theologians in the Roman Church.
The discussion with modern culture, particularly with German culture, was no less acute because of the social and political movements that arose out of it as well as because of the masterful ideology to which it gave rise. It involved for Barth a rethinking of his attitude to the social implications of the Gospel and of the whole problem of Church and State, and his concern to direct the challenge of the Gospel to the very roots of the social and political structures of modern man, where cultural developments were going so obviously astray, as could be seen by the rise of the National-Socialist movement on the one hand and the march of Marxist socialism on the other hand. Barth finds that he must move beyond a dialectical understanding of these questions to a more positive appreciation of the basic intention lying behind European culture, and yet the developing conflict with the Church which he early diagnosed made it even more necessary for the Church to take its stand securely on her one foundation on the Word of God if it was really to be able to declare both the judgements and reconciling grace of God to culture and state. Hence this aspect of Barth’s thinking had yet to reach the really decisive point where the way ahead could be seen as clearly as he saw it in 1933. But there can be no doubt that in these essays that bear here on this question, we can see that Barth has and will not give up his deep appreciation for the responsibility for culture that had been so bravely assumed by nineteenth-century Protestant theology in spite of his radical disagreement with the disastrous line that it actually took.
It was in 1927 that Barth published his first attempt at dogmatics, which he called Christian Dogmatics. That work was to prove the beginning of a few years of even greater self-criticism and clarification. The lecture which he delivered to a conference of ministers in Düsseldorf on ‘Roman Catholicism as Question to the Protestant Church’ lets us see to some extent how his mind is moving, to an even more positive conception of the Word and the Church, and to a critical revision of historical Protestant notions which may help it to recover an understanding of the very ground of its existence in the Word of God. It is not surprising therefore that the revised edition of his dogmatics should bear the title of Church Dogmatics, although before he could rewrite it considerable further thinking had to be done in disentangling his own theology from the remnants of existentialism and in working out the scientific method of dogmatics over against the claims of philosophy and exact science which we have already discussed.
This volume on Theology and Church should be read together with Barth’s account of nineteenth-century theology published in English under the title, From Rousseau to Ritschl (in USA Protestant Thought From …). In that work we can see how patient and sympathetic Barth is with his great predecessors in the history of modern theology, how eager he is to learn from every one of them, even when he must disagree and even when that disagreement is sharp and severe, and how dedicated he is to the task of understanding, with all the previous course of Christian thinking and teaching before him, the positive message of the Gospel, and of aiding his contemporaries in their search for secure foundations upon which to fulfil the task of the Church in preaching and teaching the Word of God. It has led him to speak of God the Creator in such a way that man is not allowed to vanish into nothingness or to be treated as a pawn in the fulfilment of God’s eternal purposes, but is called to stand before the heavenly Father as his dear child, and to live in such a way that his relationship with God is made visible in his daily existence. It has led him to speak of God the Saviour in such a way as to recognize the sovereign freedom of God’s grace in all his ways and works, and yet to recognize in that divine freedom the ground and source of man’s true freedom in which he is called to live as a child of the heavenly Father who in Jesus Christ has come to share his humanity and bids him in obedience to the divine love to share in the humanity of his fellows. It has led Barth to speak of God’s wisdom and patience with men, of his compassion for the world, and of the creative and regenerative work of God’s Word and Spirit for man and all mankind, of his accompanying providence that overrules all the confusion of men, and of the will of God that at last the peoples and nations of the world shall bring of their glory into the new creation, and share together in the glory of the Lord whom they are created and redeemed to serve.
