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Reading the Church Dogmatics 20: Barth’s sensibility

[T]he decision as to what is or is not true in dogmatics is always a matter of the divine election of grace.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, p. 21.

So, I’ve come to the end (I think) of my posts on §1 of the Church Dogmatics – which is all that I originally promised to do.  The jury is still out on whether I’m going to carry on into §2…

Most of what I have read so far I have found very congenial – so much so that there must be a good chance that I am reading my own views into Barth’s prose.  The idea of dogmatics as a reparative discipline that begins in media res, that stands under discipline and under judgment, that is determined by attention to the criterion to which the church points, its Lord – all that makes sense to me, and is what I would want to say of myself, to the extent that I too am a dogmatic or doctrinal theologian.

And yet – there’s something less easily assimilable here, for me.  I don’t think I can put it any more precisely than to say that Barth’s whole conception of dogmatics is embedded within a certain spirituality – by which I mean that it is embedded within a certain deeply felt construal of the nature of the Christian life, of what the church is about.  That construal is focused on election and assurance, on divine decision, the spoken promise, and our response in trust.  I don’t mean to say that this spirituality is prior to Barth’s dogmatic exploration, simply that there is a coherence between his conception of dogmatics and this theological sensibility.  Barth’s dogmatics is one part of a settlement that has this overall flavour to it.

It is, I suggest, precisely because Barth’s conception of dogmatics is so thoroughly, so seamlessly embedded in this spirituality that he can take it as read that proclamation of the Word is the heart of the life of the church, and that the content of the preaching of God’s promise in Jesus Christ is the primary subject matter of dogmatics.  And so it is only because his conception of dogmatics is so deeply embedded in this particular Protestant spirituality, this particular flavour of soteriological imagination, that he can practice the relative abstraction of content that gives his work its dogmatic character.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is a bad thing.  But I think I do need to ask what happens if one is operating with a different spirituality, a different soteriological imagination, a different church?  Dogmatics, after all, if it begins in media res, cannot begin within an invented church, an ideal church constructed from first principles.  Precisely if I am to follow along the dogmatic path Barth has set out here, I have to take seriously this question about the difference between my own ecclesial context and his.  And in my context, I don’t think I can pursue a dogmatics in which proclamation can have quite such an untroubled supremacy, in which the doctrine of the Word is the obvious starting point for dogmatic reflection – or a form of dogmatics in which there can be quite so clear an abstraction of conceptual content from ecclesial practice.

 

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