I earlier posted a one year reading plan for Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics.  As I journey this important work, I’m going to offer cursory and occasional comments and observations as I feel led to do so and as time allows.

2-Feb 9.4 The Meaning of the Doctrine of the Trinity

• “the biblical root of the doctrine of the Trinity”
• Barth argues that there is no reason other than skepticism to think that the modern Church is wildly different than the ancient Church on the question of the Trinity.  I appreciated this point greatly for reasons I don’t quite understand.
• “There seem to be no compelling reasons why we should so distrust the Church of the 4th century and its dogma that we abandon the question as to the meaning of this dogma.”
• “every baptism validly performed in our churches at least confronts us with the problem of the doctrine of the Trinity”
• Barth concludes with a strong statement on the authority of scripture in the Church.

1-Feb 9.3 Triunity

• Barth speaks favorably of the Greek concept of perichoresis and offers a helpful explanation of it.
• He traces it to John of Damascus.
• What we know of God through scripture is His acts, not His essence.

31-Jan 9.2 Trinity in Unity

• Barth gives an extended discussion of the word “person.”
• He argues that the word belongs to another era and that for it to be used today it has to be defined along the ancient understanding of that era.
• Barth prefers “mode of being” to “person.”
• God has “specific, different, and always very distinctive modes of being” (i.e., three persons).
• “We are dealing with God’s modes of beings, with God’s threefold otherness.”
• “No attribute, no act of God is not in the same way the attribute or act of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
• “Reason is naught” concerning the Trinity.
• The Trinity is biblical even it is not understandable on rationalistic terms.

30-Jan 9.1 Unity in Trinity

• Baptism is in the “name” of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, not the “names.”
• God is one.
• The word “person” in the classical doctrine of the Trinity does not refer to “personalities.”
• Good:  “But in it we are speaking not of three divine I’s, but thrice of the one divine I.”

29-Jan 8.3 Vestigium Trinitatis

• Vestigium Trinitatis refers to the idea that we see the Trinity present analogically in nature
• Barth allows some room for this so long as it does not collapse into general revelation or natural theology (he seems to say).
• As simple illustrations of what has been revealed, perhaps it has some merit, but Barth wonders if such illustrations really have any at all.
• Should we not just proclaim the revelation and do not illustrations necessarily reduce the Word of God and lift up the illustrator.
• Barth gives a very helpful overview of some of these numerous examples.

27-Jan 8.2 The Root of the Doctrine of the Trinity

28-Jan 

• The doctrine of the Trinity is rooted in God’s revelation.
• “Generally and provisionally we mean by the doctrine of the Trinity the proposition that he whom the Christian Church calls God and proclaims as God, the God who has revealed Himself according to the witness of Scripture, is the same in unimpaired unity and yet also the same thrice in different ways in unimpaired distinction.”
• Barth argues that the absence of the classical terminology re:the Trinity in the Bible does not make the doctrine unbiblical. The Trinity is in scripture even if our terminology and exact categories for describing it are not.
• Dogma rightly interprets scripture.
• Dogma must be rooted in scripture.
• We begin to see here’s Barth’s high view of the Bible in practice regardless of his theories of it.
• Barth gives a good summary of the primary Trinitarian texts in the Bible.
• “God’s presence is always God’s decision to be present.”
• Barth speaks on the holiness of God.
• A problematic statement:  “Historical does not mean historically demonstrable or historically demonstrated.  Hence it does not mean what is normally called historical.”
• We will have to see how Barth fleshes this out.
• But Barth does object to the language of “myth.”

26-Jan 8.1 The Place of the Doctrine of the Trinity in Dogmatics

• Barth argues that rational articulations of dogma are inevitable and appropriate given the proper understanding of the Word of God and revelation that he has previously articulated.
• “The first question that must be answered is: Who is it that reveals Himself here?  Who is God here?  and then we must ask what He does and thirdly what He effects, accomplishes, creates and gives in His revelation.”
• “The Bible certainly tells us who the God is whom it attests as self-revealing.”
• Barth argues that theology must begin with the Trinity even though, historically, this has not been the majority approach.
• Key:  “What we are trying to bring to practical recognition by putting it first is something which has not been concealed in the history of dogmatics and which has often enough been stated very strongly, namely, that this is the point where the basic decision is made whether what is in every respect the very important term “God” is used in Church proclamation in a manner appropriate to the object which is also its norm.”
• Barth offers helpful quotes from others who do see the importance of the Trinity.
• Summary:  The Trinity should come first because we must know the nature of the God of whom we are speaking.

25-Jan 7.3 The Problem of Dogmatic Prolegomena

• “We then saw that God’s Word concretely confronts Church proclamation in the form of Holy Scripture as the witness to God’s revelation given to the Church.  Church proclamation in agreement with Scripture is the fulfillment of the concept of dogma which dogmatics is concerned to know.”
• Barth announces that “an explicit doctrine of Holy Scripture” is now needed.
• Agreed.
• “the fact that the Bible and proclamation are or can become God’s Word.”  The wording there is very important:  “or can become”
• “The concept of revelation will have to show us how far the Bible and proclamation are to be understood as God’s Word.”

24-Jan 7.2 Dogmatics as a Science

• Dogmatics is a science along its own internal criterion.
• “It understands and describes itself as a science because it has no interest in de-facto self-segregation from the other human efforts at knowledge that bear this name…”
• Theology being produced today does not compare “with the achievements of mediaeval and post-Reformation dogmatics…”
• Regular dogmatics = studied, intentional dogmatics / Irregular dogmatics = occasional, popular, non-systematic dogmatics
• One is not better than the other.
• Most of church history likely reflects irregular dogmatics.
• But regular dogmatics is indeed needed.
• “It is certainly as well to reflect that at any moment it is possible that the question of dogma may be put and answered much more seriously and fruitfully in the unassuming Bible class of unknown country parson than in the most exact academic discussion imaginable.” / That is a wise and true acknowledgment.
• Dogmatics must stand in harmony with and be judged by scripture to be true.
• Tremendous statement:  “The time has come to lodge a protest in the name of purity and propriety against the corruption of theology which has now been in full swing so long and which has been brought about by trying to understand and treat it simply as a branch of the humanities in general…Scripture should thus be and become and remain the master in theology’s house.”
• Barth goes on to give a very strong statement on scripture as the standard and criterion by which all dogmatic assertions must be judged.

22-Jan7.1 The problem of Dogmatics

23-Jan

• The job of dogmatics is to assess whether or not the Church’s proclamation is in harmony with the Word of God.
• Another stinging attack on liberalism:  they made “cultural awareness” the criterion for dogmatics instead of the Word of God.
• Barth also indicts the palsied response of the ecclesial power structures to this liberalism and said that it itself is part of the problem (i.e., its instinctive conservativsm).
• “The Church lived on because the Bible was preserved for it…”
• This section is definitely the strongest section heretofore on the Bible.
• The Bible is God’s Word when it becomes God Word.
• Regardless, its being there is a sign pointing to the supremacy of God’s Word.
• “…God in fact has spoken and will speak the Word to us in the Bible.”
• Barth attacks the Catholic positioning of the Word within the Church throughout.
• “The Bible found a voice and finds a voice in the Church. Hence the possibility is not ruled out that it may also find a voice over against the Church.”
• This is key to understanding Barth on the Bible:  “As this event takes place according to the promise, as the Church will be the Church of Jesus Christ, the Bible will be heard as God’s Word.”
• But the Bible cannot simply be equated itself as God’s Word, according to Barth.
• “Dogma is the agreement of Church proclamation with the revelation attested in Holy Scripture.”
• True dogma, dogma consistent with the Word, judges all other dogmas.

21-Jan 6.4 The Word of God and Faith

• This continues, again, somewhat repetitively, the theme of the last section.
• Man’s faith does not come from him but is created in his encounter with the Word of God.
• “One is not to seek this capability among the stock of his own possibilities.”
• “From above, not from below!”  This is Barth in a microcosm.
• “He has not created his own faith; the Word has created it.”
• This sounds like a discussion of the order salutes. In essence, it is.

19-Jan	6.3 The Word of God and Experience
20-Jan

• This was a fairly laborious and pretty repetitive section.
• The basic idea is that the Word of God can be experienced.
• However, it is experienced as it gives itself to be experienced.
• It is not, again, experienced because of some general anthropological principle concerning human religiosity.
• Neither is it experienced because man has some power of self-determination beyond divine enabling.
• Barth sounds profoundly Calvinistic here.
• He also shoots down what we might see as prevenient grace or an attempt to say that man has an ability to experience the Word of God but that even this ability is itself a gift of God.
• Barth sees this as semi-Cartesianism that inevitably ends up in full-blown Cartesianism.
• Man can experience God’s Word only as an act of grace that enables faith.
• “The possibility of knowledge of God’s Word lies in God’s Word and nowhere else.”

18-Jan

6.2 The Word of God and Man

• The knowability of the Word of God is (a) only properly discussed in relation to the Church (as opposed to man in general) and (b) only properly positioned in the Word of God itself and not in some general anthropological principle of human knowledge.
• Barth again swipes at liberal theology that makes anthropology the basis for understanding theology.
• In particular, Barth swipes at the heirs of Descartes who apply the Carthesian idea of reality as rooted in the man’s knowing of himself.
• Man can know the Word of God as the Word of God makes itself known.
• Those who harp on the deficiencies of this view “ought not so stubbornly to hear only the No in what has been said.”
• Again, one feels classic Protestant and Reformed emphases on original sin and election in Barth’s epistemology.

17-Jan

6.1 The Question of the Knowability of the Word of God

• This is a very short section in which Barth says that the Word of God is indeed knowable.
• If the Word of God is not knowable then it would have to be called “a figment of the imagination.”
• This is certainly a key issue and it will be interesting to see how Barth unpacks this in what follows.

16-Jan

5.4 The Speech of God as the Mystery of God

• God’s Word is mystery.
• Barth gives a very interesting excursus on what he sees as a dangerous over-optimism and overconfidence among those doing theology in his day.  He calls for a sense of humility in the handling of theological terminology and concepts.
• “Mystery thus denotes the divine givenness of the Word of God which also fixes our own limits and by which it distinguishes itself from everything that is given otherwise.”
• “The veil is thick.” This is a key statement summarizing Barth’s view concerning our inability to have direct access to the Word of God.
• The Word has one content and another form.
• The form is necessarily fallen as it exists in the fallen world.
• We cannot receive direct speech from God.
• If He spoke directly to us we would cease to be.
• Barth speaks of the total secularity of the Word (in form?).
• Barth discusses the Word of God as veiled and unveiled in terminology that is paradoxical.
• Barth defines mysticism and distinguishes it from faith.
• “The Lord of speech is also the Lord of our hearing.”
• “Hearing God’s Word is faith and faith is the work of the Holy Spirit.”

15-Jan

5.3 The Speech of God as the Act of God

• This was a tough section.
• God’s Word is God’s act.
• Barth appeals to Luther: “The speech doth it.”
• The hearing of God’s Word brings man under judgment.
• Barth speaks of election.
• At times it sounds like classic Reformed theology.
• Man being a believer or unbeliever is a divine act.
• Yet Barth seems to be saying too that there is an authentic decision here.
• I almost think he is saying that inherent in the divine act of the Word is the authentic choice of man.
• The Word of God is true for the whole world.
• The Church and the World do not live in different spheres.
• The Church therefore cannot take the world seriously in its rebellion.
• This is a very interesting idea, and fundamentally true:  God’s Word is truth for everybody, even those who reject it.
• The world will never find its way to the Word of God via natural theology.

14-Jan

5.2 The Word of God as the Speech of God

• “God’s Word means that God speaks.”
• Contra Tillich, Barth argues that “speaking is not a ‘symbol.'”
• He draws a basic analogy between God’s speaking and all speaking.
• Interesting section on physicality:  “there is no Word of God without a physical event.”
• Preaching and sacrament are physical events.
• So is Jesus.
• “The Word of God…is a rational and not an irrational event.”
• Barth pushes against collapsing the “true” into the “real” or reducing the “spiritual” to the “natural.”
• He does not spend great time on this, but this is very dangerous ground and, despite Barth’s pushing against liberalism, it is almost textbook liberalism as it is briefly mentioned here.
• Jesus is the Word and His being the Word should keep us from reducing the Bible to “a fixed sum of revealed propositions which can be systematized like the section of a corpus of law.”
• Yet, Barth argues, this does not open the door to irrationality.
• This is problematic.  In the margin I wrote, “Barth trying to have his cake and eat it too?”
• Again, if the Bible becomes the Word as God speaks through it, how do we know when that happens?
• Barth says that God is not bound by the Bible:  “He has free control over the wording of Holy Scripture.  He can use it or not use it.  He can use it in this way or in that way.  He can choose a new wording beyond that of Holy Scripture.”
• This, of course, raises all kinds of questions, most of which I have mentioned all other.
• How would Barth view the idea of the canon being “closed”?
• He writes a beautiful section on God not needing man or the world in order to be God or in order to know love since He experiences loving relationship in the Trinity.
• God’s Word is power.
• God’s Word is renewal.

13-Jan

5.1 The Question of the Nature of the Word of God

• Here, Barth gives a lengthy explanation of why the new edition of Dogmatics is different than the first.
• He has apparently dropped a section or two.
• Much of his explanation has to dow with a prolonged response to an initial critique by Gogarten.
• Gogarten’s criticism seemed to be that Barth offered no true anthropology somehow related to man’s existential understanding of God’s Word.
• Barth seems stun by Gogarten’s criticism and then says that what Gogarten faults him for actually points out a deeper fault, namely that Barth’s original but now deleted section/s were trending toward an anthropology.
• Barth wants none of that.
• Barth then rebukes Gogarten for wanting an anthropological basis (even a Christological one) while simultaneously rejecting natural theology.
• Barth wants to know how you can one want while criticizing the other, for one seems to lead to the other.

12-Jan

4.4 The Unity of the Word of God

• there are “three different forms of the Word of God”: revelation, Bible, proclamation
• “As the Bible and proclamation become God’s Word in virtue of the actuality of revelation they are God’s Word: the one Word of God within which there can be neither a more nor a less.”
• The analogy = the Trinity.  Father, Son, Spirit analogous to revelation, Bible, proclamation.
• Barth suggests that Luther had a similar view to an extent and that this analogy is therefore not new.

11-Jan

4.3 The Word of God Revealed

• Basically a repetition of 4.2, but with some further analogies.
• Barth likens the Bible to the Pool of Bethesda:  it is just water, but when God acts upon it it becomes healing water.  Thus, the Bible is a human word, but when God speaks through it it becomes revelation.
• The Bible is like John the Baptist, pointing to Jesus.
• All of this raises the inevitable question:  can we trust what the Bible actually says?  Is the engendering of the Bible as the Word of God in the moment utterly devoid of the truthfulness of the text itself.

10-Jan

4.2 The Word of God Written

• In many ways Barth’s doctrine of scripture sounds like classic Reformation thought
• The Bible is “the past revelation of God that we have to recollect”
• It is the canon simply because it asserts itself as such.
• It consists of “the working instructions or marching orders by which not just the Church’s proclamation but the very Church itself stands or falls, which are not in any circumstances, not even hypothetically, to be lost to view, and which are not in any circumstances, not even hypothetically, to be regarded as replaced by others, if proclamation and the Church itself are not to be lost to view.”
• Holy Scripture has “supremacy” and “absolutely constitutive significance” over “present-day proclamation.”
• Barth seems to suggest that apostolic succession does indeed happen, but through the scriptures, not through an ongoing Petrine office.
• “The apostolic succession of the Church must mean that it is guided by the Canon, that is, by the prophetic and apostolic word as the necessary rule of every word that is valid in the Church.”
• Barth bemoans the liberal rejection of the Bible as inferior to the modern voice of the Church.
• The Church’s job is “to let the text speak.”
• On the crucial question of whether scripture can itself be called “God’s Word”:  “The Bible is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that He speaks through it.”
• God’s Word, Barth seems to be saying, speaks through the “human word” of the Bible when God speaks through these words.
• “The Bible, then, becomes God’s Word in this event, and in the statement that the Bible is God’s Word the little word “is” refers to its being in this becoming.”
• It does not, then, bear inherent authority once and for all.  It is a human word that can become God’s Word when God confronts us through it.
• This raises many questions, to say the least.

9-Jan

4.1 The Word of God Preached

• The two forms of proclamation are word and sacrament.
• Preaching has validity insofar as it preaches the Word of God.
• Preaching viewed as a necessary or inevitable anthropological reality arising from the religious impulse or, more generally, the desire of man to communicate and to know moves into into the sphere of the other sciences.
• It is not that preaching as an event that proclaims God’s Word cannot use these foreign elements, but it cannot derive its validity from such.
• What, then, is the criterion for preaching?
• God’s Word.
• But God’s word cannot be “handled.”
• Barth launches a critique of Catholic ecclesiology and specifically apostolic succession (it being one attempt to establish a criterion).
• I am grateful that the section on the Word written is next.
• The tension I feel is the tension I have felt heretofore throughout:  granting the need for epistemological humility and granting that preaching only has validity inso far as it speaks in harmony with God’s Word, has Barth not pressed this issue so far that he has made God’s Word unknowable?

8-Jan

3.2 Dogmatics and Church Proclamation

• The Church must refuse to allow its proclamation to be judged by any criteria other than the Word of God.
• Barth critiques Socialism, humanism, and Bolshevism as inferior alternatives to the Church.
• These and other threats are only really threats when the central and only true threat – the threat of God – has been ignored or turned away from.  This is a great point.
• “The Church should fear God and not fear the world. But only if and as it fears God need it cease to fear the world.”
• Barth critiques the modernism of Tillich.
• Barth offers a stinging critique to a Church culture that neglects theology as unimportant or as less useful than action or as the comfortable toy of knowledge elites.
• Barth attacks theology as mere speculation.
• Oft repeated phrase:  “Church proclamation is the raw material of dogmatics.”
• Dogmatics “tests the orthodoxy of the contemporary kerygma.”

6-Jan	3.1 Talk about God and Church Proclamation
7-Jan

• In this section, Barth is speaking of the challenge of genuine proclamation about God given the fallen nature of man.
• “The one who is awakened and gathered to being in the Church has every cause for the full assurance of faith, but none at all for certainty or over-confidence.”
• This is a line Barth consistently walks, and not without reason, but I want to distinguish between “certainty” (which surely we can have in Christ) and “over-confidence” (which I would take to mean arrogant flippancy concerning our pronouncements).
• I do not feel, though, that Barth’s usage of those words mean that.
• That being said, epistemological humility, even about our speech, as absolutely necessary.
• But surely our age is on the other end of that spectrum and does not feel that it can say anything.
• “If the being of the Church, Jesus Christ as the acting person of God, sanctifies the being of man in the visible sphere of human occurrence as being in the Church, then He also sanctifies its talk as talk about God taking place in the Church.”
• That is well said.
• Barth distinguishes between theology and proclamation:  “theology as such is not proclamation, but science, instruction and investigation.”
• Barth’s definition of proclamation:  “Proclamation is human speech in and by which God Himself speaks like a king through the mouth of his herald, and which is meant to be heard and accepted as speech in and by which God Himself speaks, and therefore heard and accepted in faith as divine decision concerning life and death, as divine judgment and pardon, eternal Law and eternal Gospel both together.”
• That is excellent.
• Proclamation can be other than preaching.  It can be sacrifice, worship, praise.
• The Church has a twofold proclamation:  (1) preaching and (2) sacrament.
• homily:  “discourse which as the exposition of Scripture is controlled and guided.”
• “the decisive definitions of the concept of preaching”:  (1) calling, (2) promise, (3) exposition of Scripture, (4) actuality
• As best I can tell at this point, Barth would say that the Scriptures attest to the Word but are not the Word (the Word being Christ).
• But does he see this as trustworthy attestation.
• He seems to in practice.
• Proclamation “has to be the action demanded and controlled by the biblical witness.”
• On page 62 and onward, Barth launches the most devastating critique of liberal preaching that I’ve ever read.
• Whatever misgivings Evangelicals have about Barth, they should not be about his critique of liberalism.  He is almost merciless in his attack and is also profoundly insightful.
• Liberal preaching is the preaching preaching to himself.
• Barth says that silence would be preferable to anthropocentric preaching:  “Why proclamation at all?  Why symbols at all?  Why not better be silent?”
• Barth argues that the Roman Catholic approach to the sacraments pushes out actual preaching.

5-Jan

2.2 The Possibility of Dogmatic Prolegomena

• An amazing section!
• Barth articulates and eschews the modernist notion that situates dogmatic prolegomena in the event of faith as an anthropological reality.
• This view predicates dogma upon anthropology and, as a result, subjugates the dogmatic task to the assertions of the sciences as such.
• Furthermore, it effectively positions dogma as a human task that can be evaluated from without.
• The progression goes like this:  “1. Anthropological possibility, 2. historico-pschological reality and 3. method.”
• But the question is “whether there really is a nexus of being superior to the being of the Church and consequently a nexus of scientific problems superior to dogmatics.”
• That would be the logical terminus of the anthropological view.
• Barth is critique the idea of “the presupposition of an anthropological prius of faith.”
• Roman Catholicism’s situates dogmatics in ecclesiology.
• Barth’s thesis:  “the place from which the way of dogmatic knowledge is to be seen and understood can be neither a prior anthropological possibility nor a subsequent ecclesiastical reality, but only the present moment of the speaking and hearing of Jesus Christ Himself, the divine creation of light in our hearts.”
• Fine and good, but how do we know of Jesus?
• FINALLY, Barth says that he is simply being a good Protestant and that “the theme of dogmatics” is the scriptures.
• Agreed!
• However, we need to understand Holy Scripture and “the Word of God.”
• Agreed!
• Fascinating and very helpful stuff here.
• A powerful critique of modernism.

4-Jan

2.1 The Necessity of Dogmatic Prolegomena

• Prolegomena is “the introductory part of dogmatics in which our concern is to understand its particular way of knowledge.”
• Barth critiques Brunner’s “point of contact” with the world “which is so important to him.” (natural theology)
• Barth levels a broadside against “all planned apologetics and polemics”
• He seems to feel that theology is inherently apologetic in its proclamation of the truth.
• “Theology is genuinely and effectively apologetic and polemical to the extent that its proper work, which cannot be done except at the heart of the conflict between faith and unbelief, is recognized, empowered and blessed by God as the witness of faith, but not to the extent that it adopts particular forms in which it finally becomes only too clear to the opposing partner that it is either deceiving him when it proposes to deal with him on the ground of common presuppositions, or that it is not quite sure of its own cause in doing so.”
• Luther is quoted to the effect that simple reaching of the gospel is apologetics.
• Faith is in conflict with itself in the sense that it is conflict with other claims of faith which make it nonsensical.  This is the reality of heresy.
• The disappearance of heresy as a category shows a weakening in our appreciation of the seriousness of theology.
• True peace becomes impossible when heresy is no longer possible, when the conflict is simply denied.
• Evangelical faith is in conflict with two heresies:  Roman Catholicism and Protestant modernism.

3-Jan

1.3 Dogmatics as an Act of Faith

• Dogmatics “demands Christian faith.”
• This is because the revelation of God is given to the Church in Christ.
• “But there is no possibility of dogmatics at all outside the Church.”
• Christ calls those in the Church – the Church responds in obedience – this obedience is faith.
• Thus, without faith, without the calling of God in Christ, one cannot do dogmatics.
• “In faith, and only in faith, human action is related to the being of the Church, to the action of God in revelation and reconciliation.”
• “Without faith [dogmatics] would be irrelevant and meaningless.”
• “It always rests with God and not with us whether our hearing is real hearing and our obedience real obedience, whether our dogmatics is blessed and sanctified as knowledge of the true content of Christian utterance or whether it is idle speculation.”
• Again, where does the Bible fit into this?
• This faith that is necessary to the task of dogmatics is most readily seen in prayer which is “the attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work.”
• I certainly agree that faith is necessary for the theological task to have integrity and that all human utterances are necessarily incomplete.  Again, though, I am left to wonder: does Barth’s view of Scripture allow for the thought that in the inspired scriptures God has spoken?

2-Jan

1.2 Dogmatics as an Enquiry

• Typed an entire summary for this section but lost it in my attempt to update the post.   Not going to retype all of it here.  Just a few quick thoughts.
• 1.2 deals with the need for epistemological humility on the basis of the fact that dogmatics is a human enterprise, the second act, whereas the first act is God’s own being and revelation.
• As such, we proceed with faith, but it is faith in a definite object. So there should not be despair.
• Barth says our job is not simply to repeat what the apostles and prophets have said, but to say what we must say today on the basis of the apostles and prophets.
• But of course that requires knowing what they said and seeing it as authoritative.
• The question of inspiration looms large here.
• Barth’s view of inspiration is controverted.
• He is right to call for humility and an avoidance of cheap triumphalism, but the question is this:  can we know the revelation of God in the Bible?
• Certainly agree that Jesus is the definitive revelation.
• Has Barth pushed beyond humility to despair?  We will have to let Barth speak.
• Seems to me that this is the crucial issue for our day as well.
• Ok.  That’s a recap of my longer post that it just lost.  (Grrrr…)

1-Jan

1.1 The Church, Theology, Science

• “Dogmatics is the scientific self-examination of the Christian Church with respect to the content of its distinctive talk about God.
• The Church confesses God (1) in the lives of individual Christians, (2) through the life of the Church, and (3) as a “science” as the “measure taken by the Church in relation to the vulnerability and responsibility of its utterance.”
• Theology is true insofar as it leads to Jesus Christ.
• There is no reason not to call theology a science, though definitions of science emanating from within an essentially pagan or human-centered construct should not be imposed on theology, thereby invalidating its own claim to be a science properly understood.
• Theology “does not have to justify itself before them, least of all by submitting to the demands of a concept of science which accidentally or not claims general validity.”
• Barth reviews certain philosophies of science, some of which theologians have embraced, and finds them lacking and not applicable to the science of theology.
• “The only way which theology has of proving its scientific character is to devote itself to the task of knowledge as determined by its actual theme and thus to show what it means by true science.”
• “Three practical reasons why we should quietly insist on describing theology as a science.”: (1) “In so doing, theology brings itself in line.” (2) “…it makes a necessary protest against a general concept of science which is admittedly pagan.” (3) In doing so, “theology shows that it does not take the heathenism of their understanding seriously enough to separate itself under another name, but that it reckons them as part of the Church in spite of their refusal of the theological task and their adoption of a concept of science which is so intolerable to theology.”
• Very much appreciate the Christocentrism of Barth’s approach to true theology.
• Also appreciate the push back against the arrogant assertion of what science and the scientific method must be.