I love old pages falling out.
After a characteristically good pull from Half Price Books yesterday, I’m the proud new owner of Karl Barth’s short treatise Dogmatics in Outline. The manner in which Barth is controversial is enough to encourage me to read his work, so when I found a copy for $3.98 yesterday I picked it up. The chapters are short, so I intend to read at least one a day and I might write my way through some of them. The first chapter is titled “The Task,” but there are a few good points Barth makes in his introduction to the English translation that are worth noting.
Despite his own contributions to systematic theology, Barth predicts the quick decline of the discipline. For Barth, the term is paradoxical at best, and dangerous at worst. The thought that theology, a life-giving discipline, can be reduced to a set of points, angles, and vectors was understandably repugnant to him. In fact, theology can’t be systematic:
Theology cannot be carried on in confinement or under the pressure of such a construction . . . Theology is a science and a teaching which feels itself responsible to the living command of this specific subject [the proclamation of the Gospel in the Old and New Testaments] and to nothing else in heaven or on earth, in the choice of its methods, its questions and answers, its concepts and language, its goals and limitations.
This quotation is important for two reasons. First, Barth emphasizes that theology is truly the queen of all sciences, and not subject to the demands of philosophy, history, cultural critics, or any other pretenders to her throne. Depending on your circle, the claim is controversial. Regardless of your circle, the claim is demanding. Secondly, in linking theology and the proclamation of the gospel, Barth moves against the common tendency of systematic theologians in which pursuit of the system surmounts pursuit of the Gospel.
In “The Task,” Barth gives this definition of theology, or a he prefers, “dogmatics”:
Dogmatics is the science in which the Church, in accordance with the state of its knowledge at different times, takes account of the content of its proclamation critically, that is, by the standard of Holy Scripture and under the guidance of its Confessions.
Barth reserves the study of dogmatics (as dogmatics) for those involved regularly in the life of the Church. This is a fairly shocking claim, but a welcome one nonetheless. It militates against the hyper-individualism that manifests itself in all kinds of churches, but particularly in low-church Protestant denominations. Throw in the (no-church) Unitarians too.
Barth also asserts the following in a lengthy paragraph:
In the science of dogmatics the Church draws up its reckoning in accordance with the state of its knowledge at different times . . . I repeat that dogmatics is not a thing which has fallen from Heaven to earth . . . It will be good for us to have just a human and earthly dogmatics . . . Christian dogmatics will always be a thinking, an investigation and an exposition which are relative and liable to error.
It might be the case that my issue with these statements come from the brevity of Dogmatics in Outline and not from Barth’s actually theology. On the one hand, it’s important to hold on to intellectual propositions loosely, since if we don’t we’re already beginning to make an idol of sorts. But on the other, I think there are some dogmatic points that have become crucial to Christianity. The Christian tenet that evil is solely destructive and insubstantial is an incredibly powerful idea that has been preserved throughout the ages of the Church. In any event, it’s important to note that while dogmatics may change, the source of those dogmatics does not. The Old and New Testament serve as the standard for any dogmatic endeavor:
We must always be putting the question, ‘What is the evidence?’ Not the evidence of my thoughts, or my heart, but the evidence of the apostles and prophets, as the evidence of God’s self-evidence. Should a dogmatics lose sight of this standard, it would be an irrelevant dogmatics.
So, like, just skip over most of that Enlightenment fueled stuff.
The goal of Barth’s science is kerygma. It is animated by the question, “What as Christians do we really have to say?” Since the point of dogmatics is proclamation, dogmatics stands “halfway between exegesis and practical theology.” Barth’s description of theology ultimately portrays it as a natural process in which the Gospel produces dogmatics, and dogmatics in turn preserve the Gospel. Dogmatics inquires of our proclamation, in order that we faithfully repeat the proclamation found in the Scriptures.
Dogmatics is guided by Scripture, and to a lesser extent by the creeds and confessions of the Church. The Fathers of the church are not as crucial or foundational as Moses, Jeremiah, or St. John, but are to be respected in the same way that we are to be “obedient to the command to ‘honour thy father and mother.’” Barth ascribes to the Church “a non-binding authority, which must be taken seriously.”
I’m looking forward to working through these chapters. If I had read this a few years ago Barth would have spared me a lot of work, so I’m hoping that if I read carefully I’ll save myself some time in the future. And at least I will have read a little Barth. A lot of Calvinists like trashing Barth without reading him almost as much as they like never reading Calvin.
