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I

CREDO

THE attempt to state and to answer the “chief problems of Dogmatics” is here to be undertaken “with reference to the Apostles’ Creed”.

It will not be our business to inquire into the origin of this text. What is in mind is that Credo which has been familiar since the eighth century; which, already known about the year 200 and pointing back to a still earlier period, succeeded in establishing itself, in the various forms of a Roman symbol, in the Christian West; which passed into the Rituale Romanum and was then recognised by the Churches of the Reformation also, as the fundamental confession of the common Christian faith. Nor does a historical analysis of this text come within our purview. We use it simply as a basis for theological investigations, in the course of which we shall necessarily have to understand and explain it not only in the light of its own time, but also in the light of the whole (and therefore also of the later) historical development.

The Credo is fitted to be the basis of a discussion of the chief problems of Dogmatics not only because it furnishes, as it were, a ground-plan of Dogmatics but above all because the meaning, aim and essence of Dogmatics and the meaning, aim and essence of the Credo, if they are not identical, yet stand in the closest connection. In this first lecture we attempt to refer from the conception of Credo, as it stands at the head of the symbol (at once as beginning and title) to the conception in which we are interested, that of Dogmatics.

1. Like the corresponding Greek πιστεύω, Credo at the head of the symbol means first of all quite simply the act of recognition—in the shape of definite cognitions won from God’s revelation—of the reality of God in its bearing upon man. Faith therefore is a decision—the exclusion of unbelief in, the overcoming of opposition to, this reality, the affirmation of its existence and validity. Man believes. And therefore: man makes this decision, credo. But what gives faith its seriousness and power is not that man makes a decision, nor even the way in which he makes it, his feelings, the movement of his will, the existential emotion generated. On the contrary, faith lives by its object. It lives by the call to which it responds. It lives by that, because and in so far as that is the call of God: credo in unum Deum … et in Jesum Christum … et in Spiritum sanctum. The seriousness and the power of faith are the seriousness and power of the truth, which is identical with God Himself, and which the believer has heard and received in the form of definite truths, in the form of articles of faith. And even the disclosure of this truth is a free gift that positively comes to meet the believing man. It is God’s own revelation. In believing, man obeys by his decision the decision of God.

All this holds for Dogmatics also. It, too, is human recognition of the reality of God as it is revealed. It, too, lives by the truth that comes to man—as obedience to a decision of God over which man has no power. It, too, is carried out concretely—in the affirmation of definite truths, and in this process the truth of God becomes concretely man’s own. Dogmatics, too, is in its substance an act of faith. But the special characteristic of Dogmatics is that it wants to understand and explain itself. Dogmatics endeavours to take what is first said to it in the revelation of God’s reality, and to think it over again in human thoughts and to say it over again in human speech. To that end Dogmatics unfolds and displays those truths in which the truth of God concretely meets us. It articulates again the articles of faith; it attempts to see them and to make them plain in their interconnection and context; where necessary it inquires after new articles of faith, i.e. articles that have not up to now been known and acknowledged. In all this, it would like to make clear and intelligible the fact that in faith we are concerned with the austere, yet healing sovereignty of the truth and to what extent this is so. Dogmatics is the act of the Credo determined by the scientific method appropriate to it—credo, ut intelligam.

2. Credo at the head of the symbol does not signify the act of faith of a well-disposed or gifted or even an especially enlightened individual as such. The act of the Credo is the act of confession. But the subject of confession is the Church and therefore not the individual as such nor in virtue of any human or even divine mark of individuality, but the individual solely in virtue of his bearing the mark of membership of the Church. When God’s reality, as it affects man, is recognised by the Church in the form of definite cognitions won from God’s revelation, then there comes into existence in this eo ipso public and responsible recognition a confession, a symbol, a dogma, a catechism; then there come into existence articles of faith. When the individual says in the sense of the symbol, credo, he does not do that as an individual, but he confesses, and that means—he includes himself in the public and responsible recognition made by the Church.

Dogmatics belongs entirely to the same sphere. It is indeed not itself confession; but it is allied with it as the action of definite individual members of the confessing Church; it is the elucidation of the current confession and the preparation of a new one. Because the Church must again and again understand its Confession anew and because it is again and again confronted with the necessity of confessing anew, it requires Dogmatics alongside of the Confession. There is no other justification for Dogmatics. An individual can be its subject only as commissioned “teacher of the Church,” i.e. as teacher in the Church from the Church for the Church, not as savant, but as one who has a vocation to teach. The private character of the professor of Theology, his views and insights as such are matters of no interest. And the same is to be said of his hearers and readers as the future preachers. Lecturing on and study of Dogmatics are a public and responsible action inasmuch as only the Church—in Dogmatics just in the same way as in the Confession—can seriously speak and seriously hear.

3. The problem of the Credo as the Church Confession arises in the problem of the Church’s proclamation. The good news of the reality of God as it affects man is entrusted to the Church. That is, entrusted to its faith. This, however, means among other things—entrusted to the work of its faith which is from the beginning tentative and fallible, entrusted to the human, the all too human, understanding and misunderstanding of the divine judgment, entrusted to the conflict and contradiction of human opinions and convictions. What becomes of the purity of that which has been entrusted to the hands of the pardoned, who always were and will be nothing else than pardoned sinners? The answer can be, and indeed must be: even in impure hands God can and God will keep it pure. But that does not exonerate us from concern for the purity of our hands or from searching after the true and proper proclamation. From this concern and this searching springs the Church’s Confession. Confession is always the result of an effort motivated by this concern and searching, is always an attempt to protect divine truth from human error and to place it on the candlestick. Confession is always concrete, historical decision, a battle action of the Church, which thinks that it hears, in various convictions and doctrines cropping up within its pale, the voice of unbelief, false belief or superstition, and feels compelled, along with the “Yes” of faith, to oppose to it the necessary “No”: for the purpose of purifying the human hands in face of the purity of the message entrusted to them in order that its proclamation may be a proper proclamation.

It is in this connection that Dogmatics gets its meaning and its task. It is no idle intellectual game. Nor is it research for research’s sake. In explaining the Confession and preparing a new confession it performs that watchman’s office that is indispensable for the Church’s proclamation. In face of the errors of the time it enters the breach where the old confession is no more regarded or no more understood and a new confession is not yet in existence. Certainly it cannot speak with the authority of the Church’s Confession, but instead of that it can, as living science, act with greater mobility and adaptability in relation to the situation of the moment, with greater accuracy and point in the particular investigation. Certainly like the Church’s proclamation itself it can deteriorate and run wild. It can very well be that, with regard to the Confession with which it is allied, it strays and leads astray. It can actually be that, instead of calling to order, Dogmatics has to be called to order and corrected by the Church’s proclamation that has kept to better ways. Dogmatics is no more able than the Confession to be a mechanically effective safeguard of the good news in the Church. Yet a Church that is conscious of its responsibility towards what has been entrusted to it will always be mindful of these safeguards. What men do in Church can from beginning to end of the line be nothing else than service. He who acts in it is the Lord, He Himself and He alone. But just as along the whole line of Church service the function of the Confession is necessary, so also this function is necessary: the scientific examination of the Church’s proclamation with regard to its genuineness. The existence of Dogmatics is the Church’s admission that in its service it has cause to be humble, circumspect and careful.

4. But the Credo does not spring from any concern or questioning of the Church, acting on its own, in regard to the genuineness of its proclamation. Not arbitrarily does faith part company in the Credo with anything that it thinks faith should not hold; not in any haphazard way does it say “Yes” here and “No” there. When the Confession makes its decisions it does not measure with the yard-stick of the ideas of truth, God, revelation and the like that happen to be current at the time, to-day this, to-morrow that, now under this prevailing point of view, now again under another. If it did that, it could not really itself be described and understood as an act of recognition, nor could it on its side make any claim to recognition. The value of the Confession lies in the fact that when it was being formed the Church, in face of the ideas of the time, inquired into the decision of Holy Scripture, and in the Confession did not simply express its faith as such, but what in its faith it thought it heard as the judgment of the Holy Scripture in points of Church proclamation that had become doubtful. In the Credo the Church bows before that God Whom we did not seek and find—Who rather has sought and found us.

Now it is just from this that the worth of Dogmatics also derives. It is preceded by Exegesis as primary theological discipline. That means that Dogmatics does not carry its norm in itself, as also it does not have its purpose in itself, but is reminded by the discipline of Practical Theology that follows on after it, of its task within the whole sphere of the Church’s service. The expert in Dogmatics is not the judge of Church proclamation. Only if he put more reliance on his philosophy or philosophy of religion than is permissible could he be willing to act as judge. His function is to point the Church’s proclamation in its whole range to the real judge. The real judge is the prophetic and apostolic witness to revelation, as that witness speaks through the Holy Spirit to our spirit. Every dogmatic effort to elucidate the cognitions already expressed in the Credo, and every dogmatic stirring of cognitions that are waiting to be expressed in a future Credo can, in their true substance, exist only in the confrontation of the propositions on occasion uttered in the Church with this judge. What Dogmatics has to exhibit with the utmost conscientiousness is the discussion that is inevitable when these two meet. No limitation or modification of this rule is involved when we add that any arbitrary appeal on the part of Dogmatics to the very Bible itself is forbidden by the fact that it is itself confession-bound, i.e. that it remembers its definite place in the Church, and therefore brings to the Confessions, in which the Church has already definitely expressed its understanding of the Bible, that respect which children owe by God’s command to the word of their human fathers.

5. The Credo finally shows the Church engaged in missionary work, directed towards the world which is not yet gathered into the Church, facing it with responsibility and appeal. How else is it to explain and defend itself, how else recruit and invite, link up and try to gain ground with its message than by confessing its faith, as far as possible in its fullness and yet in the shortest words, as free as possible from everything accidental, as far as possible purified from every ambiguity, as definite as it is possible for faith to be, i.e. in its relation to the object from which it derives its life? Even the material content of the Church’s proclamation will always have to be the Credo. Among all human factors only the fact of faith is able to summon to faith. In the Credo the Church attempts to place this fact on the map.

In Dogmatics, also, it is able to do and aims at doing nothing else. What is here added is the explanation of the Credo. It gives to the fact of faith a breadth, a distinctness and perspicuity in which the Credo as such is lacking. Dogmatics is the Credo speaking here and to-day, speaking exactly according to the needs of the moment. Be it understood: the missionary and apologetic power can even here be nothing else than faith, or the testimony to its object, or its object itself. Dogmatics has no means of throwing other bridges between Church and world than that of the Confession. But its very attempt to exhibit the Confession as, on its Scripture basis, self-consistent and comprehensible, is able to give to the Confession a peculiar language, which, with its peculiar dangers, yet also has its peculiar promise. And let it not be imagined that it is only perhaps in scientifically employed or oriented circles that many are looking for just this language, the language of the dogmatically rigorous and detailed confession.

6. What has been said would not be complete if finally we did not also remember the limits of the Credo and so also of Dogmatics. The life of the Church is not exhausted by its confessing its faith. The Credo as such and Dogmatics as such can by no means guarantee that proper proclamation with which they are connected. They are only a proposal and attempt in that direction. And even proper proclamation, secured not only on the human side by the Credo and Dogmatics, but really and decisively secured by God’s grace, has in the life of the Church three inevitable frontiers:

The first is the Sacrament, through which the Church is reminded that all its words, even those blessed and authenticated by God’s Word and Spirit, can do no more than aim at that event itself, in which God in His reality has to do with man. Just these visible signs of Baptism and Holy Communion have manifestly, in the life of the Church, the important function of making visible the bounds between what can be said, understood and to that extent comprehended of God by man—and the incomprehensibility in which God in Himself and for us really is Who He is.

The second frontier of the Credo and Dogmatics is very simply our actual human life, in its weakness and strength, in its confusion and clarity, in its sinfulness and hope, that human life of which all the Church’s words certainly do speak, without as words reaching and touching it, even where God Himself bears His witness to them. Much criticism and depreciation of Dogma and Dogmatics would remain unuttered if it were only clearly understood that human words as such must indeed serve the end, but can do no more than serve the end that our actual life be placed under God’s judgment and grace.

The third frontier is the frontier which separates eternity from time, the coming Kingdom of God from the present age, the eschaton from the hic et nunc. Credo and Dogmatics without doubt stand together under the word of Paul (1 Cor. 13:8 f.) according to which our gnosis and our prophecy are in like manner in part and will be done away, childish speech that will have to be put away when manhood is reached, a seeing in the dark mirror, not yet a seeing face to face. Meaning, essence and task of the Credo and of Dogmatics are based on conditions which, when God is all in all, will undoubtedly no longer prevail.

The existence of these three frontiers or limits might well be named at the outset the chief problem of Dogmatics. In any case we must never for a moment forget them. All that was said at the beginning holds good within these limits. And rightly understood, the very existence of these limits will no doubt give to what has been said a peculiar importance. Where you have limit, there you have also relationship and contact. Credo and Dogmatics stand facing the Sacrament, facing human life, facing the coming age, distinguished from them, but facing them! Perhaps in the way in which Moses in his death faced the land of Canaan, perhaps as John the Baptist faced Jesus Christ. Could anything more significant be said of them than this, their limitation?