[D]ogmatics is quite impossible except as an act of faith, in the determination of human action by listening to Jesus Christ and as obedience to him. Without faith it would be irrelevant and meaningless.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, p. 17.
We’ve reached the third subsection of this first article of the Church Dogmatics on ‘The Task of Dogmatics’. The first subsection, ‘The Church, Theology, Science’, established all the key themes that we have been exploring so far: theology as a reparative activity in the midst of the life of the church, under discipline and under judgment.
The second, ‘Dogmatics as Enquiry’, discussed in more depth the possibility and necessity of Dogmatics as a form of human enquiry: it is possible because God has indeed made Godself known; and it is necessary because our reception of or involvement in that knowledge is always questionable. That subsection, in other words, worked from the certainty of God’s revelation to the unavoidably human labour of dogmatic enquiry.
The third subsection, ‘Dogmatics as an Act of Faith’, treads the same path as the second, but backwards. That is, it begins with Dogmatics as ‘a part of the work of human knowledge’ (p. 17), a work that requires ‘attentiveness and concentration, . . . understanding and appraisal’ – but then asks what it means for this labour to be completely shaped (‘determined’) by the way in which God has made Godself known.
In one sense, this third subsection adds nothing new. To say that Dogmatics is an act of faith is to say no more than that it takes place under discipline and under judgment. That is, it demands ‘obedience to the call of Christ’ – it demands the discipline of discipleship, of resolving to know nothing but Christ and hum crucified, of bringing all our speech and action again and again to the foot of the cross. And it demands the acknowledgement that truthfulness is not in our hands, that ‘It always rests with God and not with us whether our hearing is real hearing and our obedience real obedience’ (p. 18), because our apprehension of Christ is always questionable. To say that Dogmatics is an act of faith is to say again that its criterion is Jesus Christ, and its success in conforming to that criterion is not in its own hands.
Yet Barth runs through this argument one more time in order to make a specific point. Dogmaticians have to take their position under discipline and under judgment – the position in which dogmatics is both possible and necessary – as the whole determination of what they do. That’s what it means to do Dogmatics – and to talk about Dogmatics, Barth has to talk about the dogmaticians commitment to that discipline and their acknowledgement of that judgment. And yet – the nature and quality of that commitment and acknowledgement must not themselves be taken as the criterion for the truth of what the dogmatician says. That commitment and acknowledgment must not themselves move to centre stage.
A dogmatic statement is not true because of the depth of the commitment of the dogmatician. It is not true because it makes deep existential sense to the dogmatician. It is not true because it resonates in a heart shaped by discipline and open to judgment. It is true if and only if it conforms to Jesus Christ – and the dogmatician’s commitment is precisely to take that alone as his or her criterion.
Barth says that he or she must do this ‘for better or for worse’ (p. 18), which I take in this context to mean that he or she must follow this criterion even if it leads to dogmatic claims that make less existential sense, that resonate less clearly in the echo-chamber of her heart, that make deep existential commitment harder and drier. We must not, says Barth, make ‘the sensus, the human determination, the experience and attitude of the knowing subject’ into ‘the criterion of theological knowledge’ (p. 19).
This post is part of a series on the opening of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics I/1.
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