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
