Daily Archives: January 27, 2014

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Reading the Church Dogmatics 19: Depending on Grace

Hence, if we say that dogmatics presupposes faith . . . we say that at every step and with every statement it presupposes the free grace of God which may at any time be given or refused as the object and meaning of this human action. 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 utterances or whether it is idle speculation.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, p.18

I remember my bewilderment the first time I read this.  Was Barth saying that one day God might decide that the Nicene Creed was no longer going to be true, and another day decide to go the whole hog and decide that all statements about God being triune are wrong? Was Barth imagining a shape-shifting God, arbitrary and capricious, who each morning decides what will be true of him?

We could only take this to be Barth’s meaning here if we understood the task of dogmatics to be the production of accurate descriptions of God – of texts that, in and of themselves, successfully refer or correspond to God. If that were the case, a claim about the truth of dogmatics would be a claim about a relationship between the text, or the text’s content, and God.  But dogmatics doesn’t deal with descriptions in the abstract; it deals with the church’s speech – the church’s life as its speech.

The fundamental task of dogmatics is to ensure that the church in all its speech places its trust in God and not in itself.  But the same words that, spoken yesterday, were a lively protest against some way in which the church has been trusting itself might today have hardened to become part of our self-protection.  Think of my previous two posts (here and here).  Yesterday’s necessary protest against a focus on religious feeling, a focus that had placed the church in judgment over the gospel, might become today’s failure to allow the whole person to be caught up in response to the gospel – and might conspire in making us theologians feel like we are capable of an intellectual mastery of that gospel.

This is why Barth, a little earlier, could say that ‘dogmatics as such does not ask what the apostles and prophets said but what we must say on the basis of the apostles and prophets’ (16).  In dogmatics, identical repetition of what we have heard is always in danger of being a betrayal of what we have heard.

The prayer that accompanies dogmatics is, therefore, not prayer to a capricious God, asking that today that God might deign to smile on our descriptions.  Nor is it a prayer for arbitrary and fickle inspiration – a miraculous ability to guess today’s divine password.  It is, rather, a prayer to be shown – and to be shown truly, by the one who sees truly – where our trust, our faith, has curved in on itself, even when we have not changed our words.  It is, in other words, a prayer to hear the judgment under which we stand, and be shown how to respond.

This post is part of a series on the opening of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics I/1.