Dogmatics in Outline, Ch. 5 – God in the Highest

As we get into the declarations of the Creed, Barth picks up the pace. It’s almost as if he got excited while giving these lectures, and that excitement comes through in the printed version. I really like his proposition for this chapter/lecture:

God is He who according to Holy Scripture exists, lives, acts, makes Himself known to us in the work of His free love, resolved on and consummated in Jesus Christ; He, God alone. 

The heart of what I think Barth is trying to say through this whole chapter is that the God we worship, the God we know and love is the God which is revealed in Jesus Christ and through Holy Scripture. He is not our discovery. We didn’t evolve into this conception of God. We did not uncover him. He revealed himself to us, and this is the only reason we know him or anything about him.

This chapter reminds me of a conversation I watched with Orthodox priest and professor, Fr. John Behr. In this conversation, Fr. Behr says, “More often than not we think about ‘What is God?’ And we normally think of him in superhuman projections.” Yet, this is not the way, as Christians, we should approach God. Our question, for Fr. Behr, is not ‘What is God?’ but, ‘Who is God?’ He says this question is “absolutely central” for the Christian, and this question is answered “simply by the person of Christ.” This revelation of God in Jesus Christ is getting a little ahead of our path through the Creed with Barth, but I think it is pertinent because the person interviewing Fr. Behr questions him with, “By starting with the question, ‘Who is God?’ rather than ‘What is God?’ are you not presupposing the existence of God already and taking us down a path that some people may not be willing to begin to walk?” Fr. Behr’s answer is brilliant and inspiring. He says, “You can’t presuppose the existence of God without specifying which God it is that you presuppose exists. Well, this is the One I confess to be God.”

This is where I think Barth is driving to through this chapter. He is using the proclamation of the angels when they announce the birth of the Messiah to the shepherds, “Glory to God in the highest,” (Lk. 2:14) as a way to speak about the first article of the Creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty. God is Almighty. He is the highest. He is beyond categories. Quoting Aquinas, he says, “Deus non est in genera,” God is not in a class. God is not one of a species. He is not a member of a group. He, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exists above, higher than, all else. As Fr. Behr reminds us, God is not the sum of all good superhuman projections. He is higher than that.

As humans, we can only conceive of things and persons in categories. We do this naturally and without thinking about it. If God is the Highest, if he is above categories, how are humans supposed to conceive of him? How are we supposed to find him? Simply put, we cannot. Barth, following Kierkegaard, says, “Note well: In the whole Bible of the Old and New Testaments not the slightest attempt is ever made to prove God.” (37) This is crucial to understanding God as he is confessed in the Christian Creed. If God could be proven, he would be like the other gods who have been discovered in human history, he would be one in a genera, in a class. But he is never in these categories, he is unsearchable, his ways are inscrutable (Rom. 11:33). He can only be revealed, and only it is only he who can reveal himself.

This is precisely what Christianity is, the self-revelation of God to human beings. Therefore, “the highness of God consists in His thus descending” (39). Or, as Fr. Behr puts it, Jesus “shows us what it is to be God in the way that he dies.” For Origen, the whole event of kenosis, of God the Son pouring himself out into human flesh that takes will embrace death on a cross, is the revelation of God.

So, the Creed’s proclamations about God, beginning with “I believe in God the Father, Almighty,” is not something we discovered, it is what we confess because it is what has been revealed to us by himself. 

This puts us in a place of humility. This reminds us that we cannot “get to” God, he must come to us. And he has. He has come to us and revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ and through Scripture. The very fact of us being able to confess this God is the “proof” that this God is alive and wants to be known by human beings.

Dogmatics in Outline, Ch. 3 – Faith as Knowledge

Christianity and Reason have always had a terse relationship. We have not known quite what to do with Reason. On the one hand, we have the beloved Apostle calling the Son of God “Logos” in the beginning of his gospel and the likes of Origen and Clement, both of Alexandria apparently leaning heavily on the philosophical ideas of their time. While on the other hand, there is Paul exhorting the Colossians to, “see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit” (2:8), and Tertullian asking, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?” For a while it would seem that the Church’s relationship with Reason would settle down in Aquinas’ work and even, at some level, that of the Reformers. But the 20th Century rolled in to the sound of shouts of hallelujah and speaking in tongues, a movement that would often come to embrace an anti-intellectual mode of being, a movement that at this moment is the fastest growing Christian community in the world.

Barth begins this chapter by reminding us that it was the devil, Mephisto, who said, “Despise only reason and science, man’s supremest power of all.” Christianity cannot be anti-rational for the very fact that we have as our Lord and God the Logos-become-flesh, Jesus Christ. There are many ideas and meanings behind the statement, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and God was the Logos” (John 1:1), but they are not less than or other than the basic idea of logos as reason.

This is important because, in order to be meaningful to the world, Christianity must be intelligible. This is not the same as saying that Christianity has to “make sense” at every point. Miracles, even in the ancient world, never “made sense,” even if they were more believable at the time. The very idea of God, uncreated and eternally here, does not make sense (why is there a God instead of nothing at all?) But these do not make Christianity irrational or anti-rational.

Faith is knowledge, then, because faith is itself a kind of knowing. In the first chapter, Barth calls dogmatics a science, because dogmatics (theology) is the study of God and the church. It is knowledge. In order to be knowledge, what dogmatics discusses and proclaims must be knowable. God must be knowable. But this is where science as we normally think of it and faith diverge. The knowledge we acquire by scientific endeavors comes about by our own effort. We come with the question, we develop the means by which to discover the answer to our questions. We interpret the results. This is a powerful truth about humanity, and it is not to be rejected or villainized. But the knowledge of God cannot be “got” by human effort, it can only be a gift from God himself.

Barth says, “Church proclamation is language, and language not of an accidental, arbitrary, chaotic and incomprehensible kind, but language which comes forward with the claim to be true and to uphold itself as the truth against the lie. Do not let us be forced from the clarity of this position. in the Word which the Church has to proclaim the truth is involved, not in a provisional, secondary sense, but in the primary sense of the Word itself–the Logos is involved, and is demonstrated and revealed in the human reason…”

Faith is knowledge precisely because their is a Subject to be known. There are things about the divine Subject, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that can be known, which ought to be known by his people. And there things about the Church who is called and formed by God and the cosmos created by God that can and ought to be known. The Church’s proclamation, the Creed (the Apostle’s for Barth’s book, but I would also add and be more inclined toward the Nicene Creed) is the utterance of the Church’s knowledge of God, and that knowledge is true. True in a deeper sense than the way 1+2=3 is true.

Barth touches on the question of whether revelation is a valid way of knowing in a tangential way. This is something he takes for granted. So much so that he is able to say that “Christian faith is concerned with an illumination of the reason,” without qualifying the statement. There is something about the brashness, the audacity of a statement like this which I appreciate.

For Barth, the reason we can have faith as knowledge is because God has made himself known. God wants to be known. God wants to be experienced. This runs counter to how many people, even many Christians think about God. People tend to think that God wants to remain hidden, that faith is blind, and that any real faith in God must be held regardless of our experience. In the documentary Ja und Nein, Barth talks about revelation and says that, if one only ears that hear, “we could hear him constantly” because he is not dead, but is alive and speaks today. If we had eyes to see, we could see God in “the beauty of spring.” This revelation happens outside the Bible, but it does not replace the Bible, for Scripture is the sure testimony of God revealed in Jesus Christ, in whom “God spoke for himself unambiguously.”

This is the crux of the matter for Barth’s theology as a whole, and I think of Christianity as a whole. Jesus Christ is the Word of God spoken to humanity as a revelation of himself. Everything hinges on and turns on Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Word of God before church proclamation (preaching/teaching) is the Word. Jesus is the Word of God before even the Bible is the Word. The Word written and the Word proclaimed are derivative of the truth, the reality, that the Son of God is the Word of God in himself. “There is no genuine rust, no really tenable, victorious trust in God’s Word which is not founded on His truth (Jesus); and on the other hand no knowledge, no theology, no confessing and no Scripture truth which does not at once possess the stamp of this living truth. The one (knowledge/theology/confession/Scripture) must always be measured and tested and confirmed by the other (Logos/Jesus).”

I’ve grown tired of the phrase, “Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship,” because I feel like it has become trite. Yet, the statement is true for Barth. Christianity is not nor cannot be another religion with ambiguous deities and moral codes. Christianity is knowing God by meeting him through faith in Jesus Christ, who is his Word incarnate. If our Christianity is anything other or less than this, than it is not Christianity, it is merely another religion.

The Word of God (Logos/Jesus) is the reason underlying, undergirding, underneath, within, behind, animating all things because it was through Jesus that God created all things. Therefore, when a person believes in Jesus, when a person trusts in Jesus and knows him, that person also finds the ground of their own being and finds the meaning of their own existence. Barth says when we know God through his Son, when we trust God through his Son, there exists within us the “inmost familiarity with the ground and goal of all that happens, of all things.” The peace that passes all understanding, then, comes from the fact that our beginning and ending, our foundation and telos, are in God. We are participating in the very ground of being, and when we are in this relationship with God, we know our telos, our goal and end, our perfection is to be with him where he is and to see his glory. It is to finally know as we are known.

Dogmatics in Outline – Ch. 2, Faith as Trust

In chapter 2 of Dogmatics in Outline, Barth begins to comment on the Apostles’ Creed. What may be surprising to some, but shouldn’t be to anyone familiar with Barth, is that he doesn’t jump immediately into the meat of the Creed, “I believe in God, the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” or even, “I believe in God.” He begins with, “I believe.” It becomes apparent very quickly that this “I believe” is not incidental, it is not merely there as a necessary introductory clause to the Creed. It is as necessary a part of the Creed as any of the creedal statements that follow.

The reason the “I believe,” (Credo – Latin, Πιστεύω/Pistevo – Greek) is such an important part of the Creed is because it is the human’s response to the statements of the Creed. Statements are made to us:

The God who exists is the Father. He is Almighty. He is the Creator of heaven and earth.

Jesus Christ is his only Son, and he is Lord. He was born of a virgin, he was crucified, he died, he was buried, he descended into hell, and he rose again from the dead three days later.

The Holy Spirit is a member of this holy Trinity (admittedly, the theology of the the Holy Spirit in the Apostles’ Creed is very thin, lol).

And to these statements we pronounce, as individuals and as a community, our Credo! our “I believe.” This is similar, I think, to Paul’s statement in 2 Corinthians 2:19-20, For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not Yes and No, but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory. Paul’s move into this statement is strange, to say the least. He’s talking about his desire to go to Corinth and his inability to do so, and is defending himself, apparently, against those who say he is a flake. This is not a biblical study, and so I will not go into all that is happening here. Suffice it to say that Paul moves into a declaration that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, he has been proclaimed to the Corinthians, and together, they have given God their “amen,” their “pistevo,” their “credo,” their, “I believe.” But they were only able to utter their amen because Jesus was proclaimed, and because, and here we see Barth’s Reformed background shine through, because God had empowered them to do so.

Barth begins his proposition for this chapter, written at or near the beginning of each chapter in italics, “Christian faith is the gift of the meeting in which men become free to hear the word of grace which God has spoken in Jesus Christ…” This meeting is between God and the human person. He acknowledges that faith is a gift, again setting him thoroughly in the Reformed tradition, yet a fact which any faithful reader of Scripture cannot deny. Yet, before we lump Barth in with other Reformed teachers, his subtlety of thought is immediately apparent: “the subjective form of faith, the fides qua creditur, cannot possibly be quite excluded from proclamation.” He doesn’t call this, at least not explicitly, choice, as it were, but he will not deny the subjective element of our faith.

I find this incredibly refreshing, especially from a modernist theologian. In a time when empiricism was king, he was able to say the subjective element of Christian faith, the experience and emotional response of the human was not merely the necessary equal-reaction to the cause of the gift and proclamation. Even though he clarifies that the reality behind the proclamation, the ground of the proclamation, of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is eternally greater than the human response, the human response is real. Again, he doesn’t call this choice, but maybe for him the Calvinist-Arminian debate was already too old and the terms overused, and therefore superfluous. I must also confess that Barth does not place near the same kind of importance as I would on the subjective nature of our faith.

What the “gift of the meeting” between the human and God creates is freedom.  The idea of freedom is very important in Barth’s work, and it is one of the ideas that first drew me to him. Interestingly, Barth’s discussions of freedom deal mostly with God’s freedom, but here human freedom is in frame. For Barth in general, it is in God’s freedom that the human finds their freedom, and I think that is what is happening here. God is free to give this gift of the revelation of himself, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and when the human receives this gift, they too become free in God’s freedom. Free to respond to this gift, free to receive it, free to utter their “I believe!”

Barth says, ” In Christian faith we are concerned quite decisively with a meeting. ‘I believe in’–so the Confession (Creed) says; and everything depends on this ‘in,’ this eis (Greek), this in (Latin). The Creed explains this this ‘in,’ this object of faith, by which our subjective faith lives.” Barth is stressing the “in” of the Creed in order to say it is not the statements of the Creed in which we believe, but it is God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in whom we believe. We do not believe in dogmas, we express them, we teach them, we study them, we work to get them right, but we do not believe in them. We believe in a Subject, we believe in the divine Person (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), we believe in God.

In this and the next two chapters, Barth teases out different ideas inherent in the word “faith” or the phrase “credo.” Here, he talks about faith as trust. When we utter our amen to God, we are saying that we trust him. What he writes about this is beautiful and I cannot deny the temptation to quote him at length:

But this ‘I believe’ is consummated in a meeting with One who is not man, but God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and by my believing I see myself completely filled and determined by this object of my faith. And what interests me is not myself with this object of my faith, but He in whom I believe. And then I learn that by thinking of Him and looking to Him, my interests are also best provided for. I believe in, credo in, means that I am not alone. God comes to meet us and as our Lord and Master He comes to our aid. We live and act and suffer, in good and in bad days, in our perversity and in our rightness, in this confrontation with God. I am not alone, but God meets me; one way or other, I am in all circumstances in company with Him. 

This is the heart, I think, more than “faith as knowledge” or “faith as confession” (the names of the following chapters) of what it means to say “I believe.” It is a confession of trust. But the confession comes after the proclamation, the trust comes after the experience of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God gives us this gift of not being alone, but being with him, and in that experience we are enabled to say, “I trust!”

This reality is concretized in the human person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. This reality is made real to us subjectively in the Incarnation. For Barth, and for the Church, “when we say I believe in God, the concrete meaning is I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.” The revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ, given to us through the Holy Spirit is what makes this Faith believable, “trustable.” It is in Jesus that we see who God is and what he is like. Origen talks about this in detail, but he puts it marvelously in On First Principles 1.2.8, where he says that through the very act of kenosis, of pouring himself out, he becomes the “splendor,” the light of God’s glory, by which we are able to see God. Without this pouring out of himself, which includes Incarnation, life, death, and descent into hell, we cannot know what God is truly like. But since we see that God is is the kind of God that pours himself out unto death, we are enabled to trust him.

Thoughts on Dogmatics in Outline, Ch.1 – The Task

Karl Barth originally published Dogmatics in Outline in, I believe, 1946 or 1947. My English version was published in 1959 by Harper Torchbooks. They are the edited transcripts of a series of lectures he delivered in Bonn, Germany. He confesses he was hesitant to publish them, as they were delivered at “seven a.m.” and the chapters have a conversational feel which I am not used to in Barth.

I am reading through the book now in preparation for a free course on the Dogmatics in Outline hosted by Stanley Hauerwas (one of my favorites) and Will Willimon, with whom I am unfamiliar.

As I was reading the first four chapters in preparation for the first session, I started to think I should write down some thoughts I had on the chapters in order to solidify my understanding of the texts. Then I thought, “I should keep these in my blog,” which I have ignored for several years now. My thoughts will be available to the public, whether for good or ill is yet to be determined. These are not academic thoughts, they are not intended to be rigorous or detailed or worthy of study. These are only me processing through what I am reading. If anyone happens to find and read these, I hope they are helpful, if not enlightening.

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Barth begins by saying that dogmatics is a science, namely, the science of what the Church teaches and proclaims. Therefore, it is the science of doctrine. This all sounds very modern and is fitting for a man such as Barth, who was working and writing through the climax of the modern period. I think Barth is communicating that dogmatics are the study and knowledge of what Christians believe and what they preach. That has been a Christian interest since the Church’s earliest years.

Dogma in the higher church traditions, such as Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, seems to this post-Evangelical to be fairly rigid. They are the things that must be believed and cannot be altered. I don’t think dogmatics is quite the same in Barth, though I could be wrong. Dogmatics, for Barth, is what the Church has always taught and believed. But even then, that privileges certain ways of believing and teaching. I think it is sufficient to say that, for Barth, dogmatics are foundational beliefs and teachings of the Church. This is not “what the Church has always said,” because what Barth is saying is not what the Church has always said, but rather he is commenting on what the Church has always said. This is the reason why the book is written as a sort of commentary on the Apostle’s Creed.

The first chapter is called “The Task,” and though he is describing the task of dogmatics, this is directly related to what the Church does, which is to preach. I’m using to preach fairly broadly, more so than I think Barth would, and by it I mean the declaration of the church (another Barthian term), which is above all other things the Gospel declaration, “Jesus is Lord.” The Church has been charged with the task of proclaiming the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and the Church is to do that in all that she does and says, in what she is as the Church. This task of proclamation is done by the Church “on earth and in time,” with all the struggles and failings, victories and blessings that attend living life on planet Earth. The proclamation of the Gospel is then, much like the content of Scripture, both a human-word and a divine-word. It is the word of God through human words.

Barth says, “As a science dogmatics takes account of the content of proclamation in the Christian Church. There would be no dogmatics and there would perhaps be no theology at all, unless the Church’s task consisted centrally in the proclamation of the Gospel in witness to the Word spoken by God.” This seems to me to be very important to the understanding of dogmatics, or systematic theology if you like, and why Christians do theology. Barth here asks two questions:

“What as Christians do we really have to say?” and,

“What are we to think and say?”

For many, especially in the traditions I come from (Pentacostal/Charismatic), have felt theology was an overdone task that leads people away from God. It is often felt that (academic) theology is a dead practice that cannot enliven the soul. The sentiment is summed up nicely in the axiom, “It’s not ‘seminary,’ it’s more like ‘cemetery.'” And, often, particularly in the West, this is true. Many young people, because they have not been taught how to think for themselves, find they cannot hold their faith when questions of authorship, dates, or historicity are posed, or when drastically divergent interpretations are presented. At this juncture, many lose heart and adopt a wildly “liberal” theological framework, often wherein the death and (physical) resurrection of Jesus are unimportant in order to keep their fledgling faith, or they opt out of Christianity all together.

But this isn’t a necessary reaction. Neither does this lessen or negate the importance of theological work within the Church. This might even prove why we need to continue the work of theology.

The Christian proclamation, “Jesus is Lord,” might seem like enough, but it cannot be. Simply for the fact that in response to this proclamation, one might say, “So what?”

Jesus is the one through whom God created the universe (in the Greek philosophical sense of the word) and by whom the universe is sustained (see Heb. 1:2-3). The universe, and we ourselves as part of it, exist within Jesus (it would be more accurate to say we exist in the Logos, but that’s a discussion for another day). And since we live in him, the statement that Jesus is Lord has ramifications on all we think, say, and do.

Because the Church is a proclaiming entity, it is imperative that the Church think about what she says. What she says, what she proclaims, what she preaches is derived from Scripture, and, according to Barth, in “guidance of its Confessions,” speaking of the historic Creeds. He continues, “Dogmatics is the testing of Church doctrine and proclamation” by nothing other than the “standard of the Holy Scriptures” and guided by the Creeds. The testing must not be against anything else, for when we use anything besides Scripture and the Creeds to guide our testing of doctrine and proclamation, we are bound to go off course. Again, this isn’t to say that the Church never has anything new to say, that we can never have different interpretations of Scripture, or that there is one and only one meaning to the text of Scripture. It does mean, however, we have to resist the pull of compromise, making things easier where they need to remain narrow and making things difficult where they should remain easy and simple.

So, if the task of the Church is proclamation, the task of dogmatics is to make sure we are thinking and proclaiming rightly. Not necessarily correctly, but righteously. By this I mean that what we teach and preach, either to believers or unbelievers, must be right by God. It must represent him well, it must glorify him, it must lift people to God, and it recognizes that the depths and majesty of God and Scripture are so great that six million words in thirteen volumes (like Barth’s Church Dogmatics) can be said about God, his work, and his church, or, as the beloved apostle says, “I suppose the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25).