International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 4 Number 1 March 2002

Whats Interesting about Karl Barth?

Barth as Polemical and Descriptive
Theologian
JOHN YOCUM*

Abstract: Much of the interest in Karl Barths theology has been found in the
formal elements of his theology, whether a single thought-form or multiple
forms. Most of that interest focuses on Barths epistemology or his actualism.
This article suggests that material theological loci, expounded descriptively,
and often with a polemical intent, were at the heart of Barths work, and are
still the richest vein of his theology. Metaphysics and epistemology were
subservient to material dogmatic affirmations. The article closes with some
observations on the continuing relevance of Barths theology.

Introduction
Despite the huge volume of energy, space and time expended on Barths
Erkenntnistheorie, and on his anti-metaphysical orientation, what is most
interesting about Barth is neither his epistemology nor his actualism, considered
as isolated systematic projects. Both are less dramatically innovative than they have
often seemed, as one can see from the long analogia entis debate, which fizzled
once Barth was made to realize the difference between Aquinas and Quenstedt.
Material theological matters, which Barth expounds descriptively at great length,
were his own primary interest, and prove more interesting now, thirty years after the
publication of the final part-volume of the Dogmatics. In fact, the epistemological
preoccupations of both Barth and many of his commentators threaten at times to
get in the way of the strong, confident, expansive and convincing depictions of the
work of Christ and of the Christian life at which Barth excels. Barth seems to have
been preoccupied with epistemology; he appears troubled, at least at some level and
at some points, about how to account for the creaturely knowledge of the Creator,
the relation of the spiritual to the physical and temporal, and the contemporary
impact of an incarnation that took place at a distant historical point.
* Greyfriars, Oxford, OX4 1SB, UK.
Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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Barths theology is marked by certain epistemological preoccupations, but,

despite many superficial readings to the contrary, Barths theology is not about
epistemology.1 Nor is Barths signal contribution to theology an innovation in the
sphere of analogy, neither as a metaphysical theory nor a theory of theological
language. What accounts for the preoccupation? Barth is an essentially nineteenthcentury theologian, as Bruce McCormack has forcibly argued,2 and so he has to, or,
more to the point, feels he has to, justify his theological assertions with
epistemological grounding, even when the justification consists of an assertion of
an exception to the usual necessity of such grounding. Despite the great debates
they have engendered, Barths epistemological justifications are not the heart of his
project. Barth needs to deal with the demand for justification of knowledge claims
in the realm of faith, but his purpose is not to explicate an epistemology, but to
explicate the act of God in Jesus Christ. Likewise, the metaphysical, or more
properly ontological, constructions in Barths theology are closely tied to the
material content of the theological doctrines Barth wishes to expound, and to
polemic against what Barth saw as perversions of those doctrines; they are not
excursions into the realm of tight, systematic conceptual construction. There is
an architecture to the Dogmatics, as the brief sketches below will show, but it is
not the result of Begriffsaufbau, but of the contrapuntal weaving of recurrent
themes.
What, then, is the value of Barths theology? At his best, Barth is a descriptive
and polemical theologian of tremendous power. Barth excels in what Hans Frei has
called first-order discourse on the work of God in Jesus Christ and its issue in the
Christian life. To put it more prosaically, Barth is at heart a preacher; his theology
is, explicitly, at the service of the proper form of proclamation in the church, and
his theology often reads like preaching. To call Barth a preacher whose theology is
at the service of, and often virtually takes the form of preaching, is to place him in
the company of Calvin, Luther, Athanasius indeed, the whole of the first
millennium of Christian theology, and perhaps much of the theology of even the
first sixteen centuries.3 That is to say, Barth is concerned above all with drawing
on, expositing, paraphrasing, and constructing, from the biblical text, a coherent
descriptive account of the act of God on and toward human beings in Jesus Christ,
and the life that is intended to result from that act. If we consider the
characterization of Barth as a preacher in this sense to be a denigration, it is
only a measure of the distance at which we stand from at least the first thousand
1 For example, Alister E. McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology
(Leicester: Apollos, 1994), p. 138.
2 Bruce McCormack, Karl Barths Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis
and Development, 190936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 4657.
3 See, for example, Yves Congar, A History of Theology, trans. and ed. Hunter Guthrie
(New York: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 38ff.; idem, Tradition and Traditions: An Historical
and Theological Essay, trans. Michael Naseby and Thomas Rainborough (London:
Burns & Oates, 1966), pp. 10737; Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, Vol. 1, trans.
Mark Sebanc (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), pp. 1574.
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years of Christian theology, and the degree to which we prize modern over
traditional forms of thought.
Barth was also a polemical theologian. His theology took its impulse from
disillusionment with the dominant mode of theology in Europe at the turn of the
century.4 It was further shaped by his encounters with Roman Catholicism,
especially in Munster, and especially in his seminars with Erich Przywara, as well
as by debate with Bultmann.5 Barths theology is consistently marked by
opposition to what he sees as theological dangers, corruptions, imbalances, and
often takes the form of a counter-weight to those influences.
I intend to offer here one illustration of Barth considered under each of the
terms noted above, as a descriptive and a polemical theologian. I will then look at
the place of epistemological and metaphysical constructions in the Church
Dogmatics and ask two questions: first, whether Barth was primarily interested in
metaphysical and epistemological issues, or dealt with them in a more instrumental
fashion; second, whether Barths work, attention to which so often centres on these
issues, ought primarily to be evaluated in terms of his achievements in those fields,
or on some other level. The evaluation offered here, obviously, is that Barths great
achievements are constituted by his potent example of descriptive theology and his
very concrete impact as a polemicist. Finally, some observations will be put
forward as to the irony, given the content of the dogmatic material considered in the
first two sections, of taking Barths primary importance to be epistemological or
metaphysical.

Barth as a descriptive theologian: the communal nature of the human

being
No one who reads the Dogmatics can fail to be impressed with Barths ability to fill
a large canvas with panoramic views of the plan and action of God on and for
humanity. To take one example, Barth depicts strongly and convincingly the
relational nature of the human being. We can follow this theme through the whole
course of the Dogmatics. Barth begins the Dogmatics with an account of theology
as a task in which one is responsible to, and takes responsibility before God as a
member of, the church. He asserts that the space in which we can speak truly of
God is the church not the isolation of Descartes hearth (and ultimately Descartes
head), but a congregation of those who have been brought together in faith:

4 See the Preface to CD I/1.

5 Reinhard Hutter makes an interesting and compelling case for the predominance of
Barths concern with Roman Catholicism precisely because he finds it more attractive
and dangerous than Protestant Liberalism. See Reinhard Hutter, Karl Barths
Dialectical Catholicity: Sic et Non, Modern Theology 16 (2000), pp. 13757. On
the dual polemics with Roman Catholicism and Bultmann, John Yocum, Ecclesial
Mediation in Karl Barth (D.Phil. thesis: University of Oxford, 2000), ch. 4.
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Dogmatics is a function of the Christian Church. The Church tests itself by
essaying it. To the Church is given the promise of the criterion of Christian
faith, namely the revelation of God . . . But there is no possibility of dogmatics
at all outside the Church. To be in the Church, however, is to be called with
others by Jesus Christ. To act in the Church is to act in obedience to this call.
The obedience to the call of Christ is faith. . . . Faith is the determination of
human action by the being of the Church and therefore by Jesus Christ, the
gracious address of God to man. 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.6

The deeper ground of this communal entity is the nature of God himself, which
nature Barth expounds from the first as triune in se and revealed as such through the
act of Revelation which takes place in Jesus Christ.7 It is vital to take account of the
fact that the theology of revelation that Barth is dependent on here is firmly rooted
in the biblical accounts of revelation in both the Old and New Testaments. The
biblical material is the wellspring of Barths theology, and its coherent explication
is his goal:
Perhaps more important than anything dogmatics can say about the preeminent place of Scripture in the Church and over against the Church is the
example which dogmatics itself must give in its own fundamental statements.
It must try to do what is undoubtedly required of the Church in general,
namely, to pay heed to Scripture, not to allow itself to take its problems from
anything else but Scripture.8
In that sense, it is accurate to call preaching, or more precisely, Church
proclamation, the source of Barths theology.9
In the second volume Barth expounds the doctrine of election in a manner
consistent with the relational anthropology implicit in the first volume. Election is
election to be part of a body, and is mediated to the individual as such. That is,

6 CD I/1, 17.
7 The classic account of the rationale of Barths trinitarian doctrine is Eberhard Jungel,
The Doctrine of the Trinity: Gods Being Is in Becoming, trans. Horton Harris
(Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press, 1976).
8 CD I/1, p. 310. Whether Barth has successfully interpreted the Scripture on this matter,
or whether he adopts a master-concept of revelation that distorts his doctrine of the
Trinity is another matter, of course. For the most thoroughgoing critique of Barths
handling of the doctrine, see Alan J. Torrance, Persons In Communion: An Essay on
Trinitarian and Human Description, with special reference to Volume One of Karl
Barths Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996).
9 For two accounts of preaching as the orientation-point for Barths theology, see Axel
Denecke, Gotteswort als menschenwort. Karl Barths Predigtpraxis Quelle seiner
Theologie (Hanover: Lutherisches Verlaghaus, 1989); Hartmut Genest, Karl Barth und
die Predigt. Darstellung und Deutung von Predigtwerken Karl Barths (NeukirchenVluyn, Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1995).
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though the goal of election, according to Barth, is the individual human being, that
election entails membership of the community of the elect, bound in inseparable
unity with the electing God and the elected human being, Jesus Christ, who in
himself encloses all the elect:
All the election that has taken place and takes place in Jesus Christ is mediated
[vermittelt], conditioned and bounded by the election of the community. It
mirrors in its mediate and mediating character the existence of the one
Mediator Jesus Christ, Himself. In its particularity over against the world it
reflects the freedom of the electing God, just as in its service to the world (that
is, in the provisional nature [Vorlaufigkeit] of its particularity) it reflects his
love. It is only in virtue of this reflection that witness to Jesus Christ, the
summons to faith in Him and therefore the faith of the individual are achieved.
Included in the election of the community in the community, by [durch] the
community (and then at once for it as well), these are elected in and with the
election of Jesus Christ. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. This proposition has its
place already in the doctrine of predestination, in the doctrine of God.10
Election entails membership of a community because election is to a covenant
between God and a people he has joined to himself. Thus, the nature of the human
as thoroughly and essentially communal being has begun to take shape through the
outworking of the doctrines of the Trinity and Christology, before Barth has even
announced an anthropology.
In the third volume, Barth carries forward this corporate anthropological
principle in two especially striking ways. First, Barth makes an explicit connection
between anthropology and Christology. He argues that to know what a human
being is, is to know Jesus Christ, and that apart from him there is no true
anthropology. Now is this, from the point of view of Christian theology, so
outrageous a claim as one might first be tempted to think? Barth contends that
creation has as its goal the covenant, the relation between God and humanity, again
considered as a corporate entity. Barth is making the fundamental point that in
Jesus Christ we see the true human being, the goal of humanity. He describes the
human being of Jesus Christ as consisting, concretely, in his being a man for God,
and a man for others. (Compare Barths treatment here with the first chapter of
Veritatis Splendor, which consists in variations on the same theme, centred on a
meditation on the gospel account of the rich young rulers encounter with Jesus.)
Jesus Christ reveals then, that the human being is a communal being, whose being
is realized, the goal of whose creation is fulfilled, in relation, and specifically in
love. This again, hearkens back to the chapter in Volume One which describes the
life of the children of God in terms of the first and second commandments.11
Second, he construes the imago dei of Gen. 1:27 as the creation of the human
race as male and female, as consisting of a relational essence which indirectly
10 CD II/2, p. 197.
11 CD I/2, 18.
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mirrors that of the triune God.12 The human race as male and female in itself stands
in relation, just as God is, as Edwards said, in Himself a sweet society:
Even in his inner divine being there is relationship. To be sure, God is One in
Himself. But He is not alone. There is in Him a co-existence, a co-inherence
and reciprocity . . . And it is this relationship in the inner divine being which is
repeated and reflected in Gods eternal covenant with man as revealed and
operative in time in the humanity of Jesus.13
The humanity even of Jesus, Barth is eager to assert, is only indirectly and not
directly identical with God.14 It is an imago dei indeed, the imago dei: God in
relation to what is outside God. Nonetheless, for humanity in general, his
creaturely being is a being in encounter between I and Thou, man and woman. It
is human in this encounter, and in this humanity it is a likeness of the being of its
Creator and a being in hope in Him.15 Thus, we now have the formal and explicit
grounding of anthropology in trinitarian theology.
In the fourth volume, Barth advances the theme again by reflection upon the
work of the Holy Spirit in sanctification as the gathering of the community in the
section on Jesus Christ the Lord as Servant (CD IV/1, chapter XIV). The selfhumiliation of the Son of God which justifies and sanctifies humanity is realized in
the work of the Holy Spirit to gather a community in faith. The Holy Spirit is the
awakening power in which Jesus Christ summons a sinful man to His community
and therefore as a Christian to believe in Him: to acknowledge and know and
confess Him as the Lord who for him became a servant.16 The exaltation of
humanity through the exaltation of the Servant who is also the Royal Man
expresses itself in the life of love. The Holy Spirit is the quickening power in
which Jesus Christ places a sinful man in His community and thus gives him the
freedom, in active self-giving to God and his fellows as Gods witness, to
correspond to the love in which God has drawn Him to Himself and raised him up,
overcoming his sloth and misery.17 Finally, under the rubric of The Glory of the
Mediator, the task of grateful and obedient witness is described in wholly
communal terms:
The Holy Spirit is the enlightening power of the living Lord Jesus Christ in
which He confesses the community called by Him as his body, i.e., as his own
earthly-historical form of existence, by entrusting to it the ministry of his
prophetic Word and therefore the provisional representation of the calling of
all humanity and indeed of all creatures as it has taken place in Him. He does
this by sending it among the peoples as his own people, ordained for its part to
12
13
14
15
16
17

CD
CD
CD
CD
CD
CD

III/2, pp. 285324.

III/2, p. 220.
III/2, p. 219.
III/2, p. 203.
IV/1, 62.
IV/2, 68.
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confess Him before all men, to call them to Him and thus to make known to the
whole world that the covenant between God and man concluded in Him is the
first and final meaning of its history, and that his future manifestation is
already here and now its great, effective and living hope.18
The task of the community to embody in its being and confession the provisional
representation of the calling of all humanity parallels Barths description of the
community in the Doctrine of Election as occupying a mediate and mediating
position in relation to Jesus Christ and the individual.19
Barths fascination with Mozart has become a cliche. Nonetheless, it is striking
how similar the structure of the Dogmatics is to that of a piece of Mozarts music:
themes are introduced, recede, resurface in new settings, and so on. Colin Gunton
has called attention to this manner of theologizing as important for understanding
Barths work.20 Barth is not von Balthasar; he neither thematized the glory of the
Lord, nor, if his own account is to be credited, did he consciously set out to
compose something beautiful. (Though comparison with Mozart flattered him.)
He did however, in fact, if not in conscious intention, compose a work which is
dedicated, as Gunton says, to the celebration of the perfection of the God made
known in Jesus Christ.21 We will return to the importance of this observation later.
For now, it is worth recognizing that it is only by stepping back and taking in the
Dogmatics as a whole that the force of Barths depiction of that perfection has its
full effect.

Barth as a polemical theologian: negative ecclesiology22

It is often said (one is tempted to say ad nauseam) that the spirit of John Henry
Newman hovered over the Second Vatican Council. Karl Barth claimed that he was
also present at the council in spirit, though illness prevented him accepting the
invitation to attend as an official observer. It would be too much to say that Barth
had an influence comparable to Newman, but it would not be outrageous to say that
Barth also made his presence felt at the council.
The words of the theologian whom Pius XII (of all people!) called the greatest
since Aquinas, and whom Paul VI called, more modestly, the greatest since the
Reformation, seem to find an echo in council texts like Dei Verbum, which refers to
18 CD IV/3.2, p. 681.
19 CD II/2, p. 197.
20 Colin Gunton, Bruce McCormacks Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its
Genesis and Development 19091936, Scottish Journal of Theology 49 (1996), pp.
48391, p. 489.
21 Colin Gunton, Bruce McCormacks Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, p.
489.
22 The phrase was coined by Edward Schillebeeckx, and is used by John Webster to
describe CD IV/4. John Webster, Barths Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 166.
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Christ, who is Himself the mediator and sum total of revelation23 and the Church
has always venerated the divine Scripture as she venerated the Body of the Lord, in
so far as she never ceases, particularly in the sacred liturgy, to partake of the bread
of life and to offer it to the faithful from the one table of the Word of God and the
Body of Christ.24 The intimate connection of word and sacrament that is affirmed
here is not unlike that which Barth affirms in Church Dogmatics I/2.25 Indeed, one
of the most influential periti of the Council was able to say,
Karl Barth . . . in his great Trinitarian and economic theology of the Word of
God, provided a dogmatic systematisation of this role of the Spirit [enabling to
receive revelation]. The Holy Spirit, he claimed, is God in us, allowing and
enabling us to believe and receive the Word as the Word of God, to share in
Gods revelation of Himself and to speak of Christ as the Word made flesh. At
its own level, this vision is insurpassable.26
The impact of Barth on Catholic theology in the twentieth century is a wellrehearsed theme,27 though as I shall point out below, studies of Barth in comparison
with Catholic theologians cover a fairly narrow field (most fruitfully in dialogue
23
24
25

26
27

Dei Verbum, I, 3. Barth was not uncritical of Dei Verbum, but his criticism seems to be
that its claim to walk in the footsteps of the [first] Vatican Council is at odds with its
real content.
Dei Verbum, VI, 21.
We will not always be noting about a theology whether it has any knowledge of
baptism and the Lords Supper, or whether these things are at bottom an embarrassment
to it, which it must pester itself to say anything sensible about. If this is indeed the case,
it will surely be revealed at some quite different (though only apparently different)
point. We shall perceive that it has no proper knowledge of the distinct validity of the
prophetic and apostolic word in the Church, or of the value of dogma, or of the
theological relevance of the decision of Nicaea or the decision of the Reformation. And
certainly it will not be able to value preaching as the central part of the Churchs liturgy.
And we shall have to ask whether a theology of this kind can have any awareness of the
comprehensive and unassailable givenness of revelation itself . . . It is from the
standpoint of baptism and the Lords Supper that the prophets and apostles, and in their
turn the Fathers and Reformers are really fixed: and fixed in such a way that we cannot
evade them. And when it is regarded in the light of baptism and the Lords Supper that,
parallel to every temporal movement in time in which it must occur, preaching too must
and will always acquire that peculiar element of fixity, of unchanging similarity to
itself, without which it ceases in any really effective way to bear witness by the mouth
of man. Et incarnatus est. (CD I/2, pp. 2301).
The Word And The Spirit, trans. David Smith (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), pp.
1213.
See, for example, Grover Foley, The Catholic Critics of Karl Barth in Outline and
Analysis, Scottish Journal of Theology 14 (1961), pp. 13651; Emilien Lamirande, The
Impact of Karl Barth on the Catholic Church in the Last Half Century, in Footnotes to a
Theology: The Karl Barth Colloquium of 1972, ed., Martin Rumscheidt ([n.p.]: Canadian
Corporation for Studies in Religion, 1974), pp. 11241; Roman Catholic Reactions to
Karl Barths Ecclesiology, Canadian Journal of Theology XIV (1968), pp. 2842. A
newer contribution on this topic, surveying the Roman Catholic scene since the rather
heady and confused early days of the post-conciliar period would be welcome.
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with Aquinas, but more commonly with Przywara, von Balthasar, and especially
Rahner).28 Barths impact was made primarily through Auseinandersetzung with
positions that he held to be erroneous or inadequate. Barth excelled at polemic, in
part because of his potent rhetorical skill, but also because he knew very clearly
what he wanted to oppose, though he was not always so clear about who
represented it. His negative ecclesiology is a prime example of his polemical
theology.
Barth re-works the doctrine of the invisible and visible church in a way that
bears some similarity to his re-working of the doctrine of election.29 Just as election
does not have to do with the separation of the individually elect and individually
reprobate, the doctrine of the visibility and invisibility of the church is not concerned
with a distinction between the visible congregation, composed of wheat and tares,
and the invisible congregation, the truly elect. Rather, the church is visible in that it
is a specific and yet also an integrated, a distinctive and yet not a unique element in
the whole of human culture . . . In all this . . . the Church is visible, ecclesia
visibilis.30 The church is invisible in this: The community is the earthly-historical
form of existence of Jesus Christ Himself . . . The Church is his body, created and
continually renewed by the awakening power of the Holy Spirit.31
Thus, Barth stresses the personal nature of the union between Christ and his
church, rather than the institutional form of the church, or its visible actions.32 He is
inclined to speak of the Community, the Gemeinde,33 which, while it has offices of
service, does not make ontological distinctions between its members, nor take those
offices themselves to be invested with the authority to dispense grace nor to speak
in the person of the churchs Lord.34 The church must always stand over-against
Christ, witnessing to him by pointing away from itself; Barth favoured Joseph over
Mary as an image of the church.35
28 See, for example: Thomas Leavey, Christs Presence in Word and Eucharist. Illustrated
by Karl Barths Doctrine of the Word of God and Contemporary Sacramental
Theologians Doctrine of Christs Activity in the Eucharist, (Ph.D. dissertation;
Princeton University, 1968); Bruce Marshall, Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a
Saviour in Rahner and Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Paul D. Molnar,
Karl Barth and the Theology of the Lords Supper: A Systematic Investigation (New
York: Peter Lang, 1996).
29 CD IV/1, pp. 650725.
30 CD IV/1, p. 652.
31 CD IV/1, p. 661.
32 See the long, and rather tendentious, treatment of the four marks of the church, CD IV/1,
pp. 668725.
33 It is probably significant that the ecclesiological sections of CD IV use Gemeinde in
their headings, rather than Kirche.
34 See The Ministry of the Community, CD IV/3.2, pp. 830901.
35 Karl Barth, Ad limina apostolorum: an appraisal of Vatican II, trans. Keith Crim
(Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1969), p. 15. This little book contains some impressively
prescient reflections on most of the texts of Vatican II. Thirty-two years after its
publication, many of Barths remarks, especially on Gaudium et Spes, have a prophetic
ring to them.
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Barth was something of an ecumenical gadfly. He outraged his Protestant

confreres by raising in the 1920s the inconceivable possibility that the Roman
Catholic Church might in certain respects call the Protestant Church into question.
He outraged Catholics by suggesting, in the first pages of the first volume of the
Dogmatics, that the Pope was allied with the anti-Christ. He outraged nearly
everyone by his angry speech at Amsterdam, admonishing Protestants not to waste
their tears over the absence of Catholic delegates to the World Council of
Churches, and declaring that Catholics did not belong in a gathering of humble
brethren attempting to hear the Word of God.36 His approach, however intemperate
his speech sometimes may have been, accords well with Martin Bubers insight that
truly respectful encounter entails honest disagreement.
To take the measure of Barths impact as a polemical theologian, one has only
to read, for example, Lumen Gentium, with its stress on the faithful, and its
avoidance of simply equating the hierarchy with the Church. There is a repeated
insistence on the reality of the institutional and hierarchical aspects of the church,
but these are muted, relative to the speech that often characterized the Catholicism
of the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. Similarly Dei Verbum makes
clear that the bishops stand under and serve the Word of God.37 It would be far too
simplistic to ascribe these developments to Barths impact, but some of the key
figures in twentieth century Catholic theology von Balthasar, Congar, Danielou,
Rahner, to mention some of the most important acknowledge a large debt to
Barth.

The place of epistemology and metaphysics in the Dogmatics

Barths descriptive and polemical aims decisively shape his approach to
epistemology and ontology, and the way in which he makes use of the conceptual
tools available to him. In fact, in these traditionally prolegomenal areas we are no
less dealing with the polemicist and narrative theologian than we are in his more
explicit treatments of particular doctrines like the sacraments or the authority of the
Bible. This is fully consistent with Barths refusal of non-material prolegomena to
dogmatics.
Barth sometimes described his task, and the proper task of all theology, as theanthropology. It was his firm conviction that the human creature cannot be
understood apart from the Creator, nor is the Creator revealed apart from his
relation to the creature. His theology centres on a kind of ontology rooted in the
Creatorcreature relation. Now, in order to address the question of metaphysics in
the Dogmatics, we have to ask two questions: first, on what does Barth build his
36
37

For the correspondence that followed the Amsterdam conference, see Gesprache nach
Amsterdam, Karl Barth, Jean Danielou, Reinhold Niebuhr (Zollikon-Zurich: Evangelische Verlag, 1949).
Dei Verbum, II, 10.
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ontology? Second, does the absence of a general theory of being imply the rejection
of the validity of metaphysics as the investigation and elaboration of solutions to
the problems of being and predication, or to the solutions that have been offered to
those problems in Western thought since Parmenides?
With regard to the first question, there are three key elements in Barths
ontology that reveal a great deal about the interests and approach of Barths
theology. The first of these elements is Barths teleological casting of the doctrine
of creation. Barth maintains, especially on the basis of Jn 1:1-4; Eph. 1:4; Col. 1:15
that the doctrine of creation cannot be abstracted from the whole Christian gospel,
or detached as a preamble to the event of Gods reconciling action in Jesus Christ.
The purpose and therefore the meaning of creation is to make possible the history
of Gods covenant with man which has its beginning, its centre and its culmination
in Jesus Christ. The history of this covenant is as much the goal of creation as
creation itself is the beginning of this history.38
The second key element is the role of the enhypostaticanhypostatic
Christology Barth adopts. According to this, the man Jesus of Nazareth does not
exist apart from his union with the Logos; his humanity is anhypostatic, without
independent existence. Furthermore, however, the hypostasis of humanity is
enclosed within the being of Jesus Christ. That is to say, there is no human
existence independent of him. The being of Jesus Christ is not paradigmatic in
some ideal way, as if he represented the highest expression of a common humanity,
defined according to an essence that can be abstracted from the being of humanity
in general. To be a human being is to exist according to the definite plan and
foreknowledge of God which is fulfilled in the history of Jesus Christ:
The ontological determination of humanity is grounded in the fact that one
man among all others is the man Jesus. So long as we select any other starting
point for our study, we shall reach only the phenomena of the human . . . In this
case we miss the one Archimedean point given us beyond humanity and
therefore the one possibility of discovering the ontological determination of
man.39
Finally, and most controversially, the being of Jesus Christ is Jesus Christ
crucified. Along with Athanasius, but seemingly no one else in the early church,
Barth contends that the proper understanding of Rev. 13:8 is that the eternal being
of Jesus Christ is Jesus Christ crucified; that the suffering of the Son of God is not
the result of a decision following creation, but is prior to creation.40 This implies a
great deal about God, humanity, and the relation between the two. It implies that
humanity is utterly dependent upon God, and in need, of its very nature, of his
38 CD III/1, p. 42.
39 CD III/2, p. 132.
40 CD II/2, p. 117. Barth gives a lengthy citation from Athanasius, C. Ar. 7577, where,
though Athanasius does not quote Rev. 13:8, his reasoning follows the main lines of
Barths.
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existence to support its own. But more than this, Jesus Christ not only tells us
something about the nature of humanity, but about the nature of God in relation to
humanity; that he is the kind of being who is able and prepared to enter into relation
at cost to himself; who can do so without being any less God; indeed, in perfect
reflection of the being of God.41
This all gives some scope for controversy, but three things are worth noting in
relation to the role of Barths ontology in the Dogmatics. First, Barth is once again
attempting to build on the material content of the tradition. The first and third
elements in Barths account the teleological casting of the doctrine of creation,
and the pre-existence of the Crucified are explicitly drawn from the material
content of the Bible. The second the role of the humanity of Jesus Christ builds
on two supports: a variety of biblical passages related to the role of Christ; and an
inference from the patristic doctrine of the enhypostasisanhypostasis relation of
the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ.42 Secondly, Barth once again pursues all
this in a descriptive manner. His concern is with the narrative of Gods creative and
salvific acts in Jesus Christ. The result is a kind of epic, spanning the last ten
volumes of the Dogmatics, from the history of God in se to the ethical human
answer offered to the divine grace in the life-act of the Christian community and
its members.
Barths primary engagement in the realm of metaphysics was to reject anything
he thought endangered the priority of divine grace in the relation of God and
humanity, either on the ontic or the noetic level. His one lengthy treatment of the
analogia entis deals almost exclusively with the work of one Calvinist scholastic,
Quenstedt, who himself relies on Suarez.43 Barth never directly engages Plato,
Parmenides or Aristotle. As for questions of being and predication, Barth gives
little space to them. He seems not to have been aware of the revolutionary character

41

42
43

It must be pointed out, however, that Barths emphasis in treating the Deus incarnandum
is on the determination of the Son of God as the Son of man (CD II/2, p. 110), so that
neither the crucifixion nor the incarnation of the Word can be interpreted as somehow
necessary to the inner life of the Godhead. The cross is revelatory of God in his relation
to humanity, not revelatory of the immanent life of the Godhead.
On the patristic history of this doctrine and its agreement with that of Barth, see the
excellent article by Uwe Lang, Anhypostatos-Enhypostatos: Church Fathers, Protestant
Orthodoxy and Karl Barth, Journal of Theological Studies 49 (1998), pp. 63057.
CD II/1, pp. 277ff. Barth acknowledges that if the account of analogy offered by
Gottlieb Sohngen is an accurate reflection of Roman Catholic theology on the question,
he would not take exception to it. But he questions whether Sohngens account is
typically Roman Catholic (CD II/1, p. 81). When Barth does tackle the analogia entis,
he takes as a good summary of the results of all earlier studies of the older dogmatics
Quenstedts Theologia didactico-polemica sive systema theologicum (CD II/1, pp.
232ff.). A neglected treatment of this whole area is Henry Chavannes, The Analogy
between God and the World in St. Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, trans. William
Lumely (New York: Vantage Press, 1992). For a recent interpretation of Aquinas that
counters the Cajetanian view, see Ralph McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy (Washington:
Catholic University of America Press, 1996).
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at times attributed to his actualism in relation to the metaphysical tradition.44

Furthermore, where Barth does speak explicitly of metaphysics, he is sharply
critical, not of the metaphysics of the patristic period, nor even that of the
medievals, but of the Idealists. He opposes the conflation of the human mind or
spirit and the divine, which he finds common to Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher and
Ritschl.45 Sinful man according to Gods revelation is man exalting himself,
and thinking that by his own efforts he can realise and assert the being of God.46
Barth was very clear that epistemology must be rooted in ontology, that is to
say, that what we know must be rooted in the way things actually are: we must have
genuine knowledge. Barth is a realist in the sense that theological knowledge has
an object, and its speech has a referent. What Barth wants to say, further, is that
knowledge of God is the gift of God, and that truth is not the possession of the
theologian, or the preacher or the institutional church. He makes theological
knowledge an exception to what he takes to be the general act of knowing, because
the act of knowing, according to Kantian epistemology, places the object at the
disposal of the subject. Thus, the metaphor of the open centre of theology.47 What
one confronts in dealing with the subject-matter of theology is ultimately not a dead
text, but a living Person. Perhaps the implications of this are most clearly evident in
Barths insistence that the most important factor in hermeneutics is the living
Person of Jesus Christ, who speaks.48
What drove Barths concern about natural theology, and what he for some time
took to be its ally, the analogia entis, as well as his concern about epistemology, is
tied to his rejection of any form of immanentism that seems to encroach upon the
divine prerogative to judge, to dispense grace, to reveal himself at his own good
pleasure. Barth was first impelled to throw his considerable rhetorical weight
against neo-Protestantism by his horror at the support of liberal theologians for the
German Kulturkampf and its outcome in the First World War. They had
domesticated God, forming him in their own cultural image, to serve their own
purposes. When Feuerbachs theory is set against that kind of religion, it has
credibility.
Even here we have to qualify the use of the term immanentism. Barth says
explicitly that Jesus Christ is immanent in the Christian religion.49 What Barth
wants to avoid is the kind of immanence that he takes to be represented by Hegel
44 See Robert W. Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth
(Edinburgh: Nelson, 1963), p. 140.
45 CD II/1, p. 270.
46 CD II/1, p. 270.
47 CD I/2, p. 866.
48 See John Webster, Hermeneutics in Modern Theology, Scottish Journal of Theology
51 (1998), pp. 30741.
49 CD I/2, p. 358. On Barths treatment of religion, see Gerhard Steck, Karl Barths
Absage an der Neuzeit, in Karl Barth und die Neuzeit, eds. Dieter Schellong and Karl
Gerhard Steck, Theologische Existenz Heute 173 (1973), pp. 533; Gunther Wenz,
Barths Sonnengleichnis: eine Analyse von KD 17, Gottes Offenbarung als Aufhebung
der Religion, Zeitschrift fur dialektische Theologie 11 (1995), pp. 12155.
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(Feuerbachs immediate target): the identification of the knowing subject and the
object known. His reaction to that sort of immanence, in my view, makes him less
than fully alert to the importance of a vigorous and effective pneumatology; but, we
can only reckon with the weakness of Barths pneumatology when we get clear on
what he wants to avoid. Now, here we begin to make some headway on the real
philosophical dangers Barth inveighs against. Barth said late in his life, with some
bemusement, that people had often misunderstood his critique of religion. He made
plain that his critique was, first of all, not to be confused with Bonhoeffers
enigmatic religionless Christianity. (Barth claimed that is impossible to grasp
what Bonhoeffer was really getting at from some sketchy notes written in Tegel.) It
was also not a critique of non-Christian religions, which he admits is beyond his
competence. I was talking about Schleiermacher, Barth bluntly says.50
So, once again, the descriptive and polemical theologian come together.
Barths interest in the questions of epistemology and ontology are shaped by his
determination to render an account of the action of God and the relation of God and
humanity that does full justice to the biblical account. He aims to do this in the
context of the times and circumstances in which the theologian carries out his task,
that is to say, in service to the proclamation of the Church in the time and
circumstances in which it is commissioned to proclaim Jesus Christ.
Barth is in that sense a theologian of tradition. He understood himself to be
engaged in critical reflection upon the inherited self-understanding of the life and
mission of the church. The theologian is obliged to listen to the voices of tradition,
to the Fathers, not slavishly repeating them, but transposing the truth of what they
passed on in a respectfully critical attitude in new circumstances.51 Where Barth,
like any theologian, was most apt to go wrong was precisely where the force of
current concern pressed most strongly toward over-reaction. (That I take to be the
case in Barths disastrous rejection of the tradition almost in its entirety, including
the New Testament, in CD IV/4.)

The irony of Barth studies

Where does this leave us? I will make two brief and general suggestions about the
significance of viewing Barth as a descriptive and polemical theologian. First, we
have to be careful about McCormacks characterization of Barth as a modern
theologian.52 Certainly he is not, as McCormack has ably proved, a post-modern
50

51
52

From an interview with Fischer-Barnicol, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 28: Gesprache, ed.

Eberhard Busch (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich, 1996). Barth has almost no
dialogue with other religions in the Dogmatics, but there is a brief, fascinating survey of
what he calls Japanese Protestantism within the Buddhist Yodo-Shin and Yodo-ShinShu movements (CD I/2, pp. 3404).
Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, trans. Grover Foley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1996), pp. 42ff.
McCormack, Karl Barths Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, p. 466.
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theologian, if that term denotes the kind of theology that builds on the sociolinguistic theories of Derrida, Foucault, and ultimately Nietzsche.53 I also grant to
McCormack the characterization of Barth as a modern theologian, inasmuch as
Barth does accept a great deal of the philosophy of his period as applicable to
human knowledge in general and to natural states of affairs. Yet, in another, more
important way, Barth is not a modern theologian. McCormack acknowledges that
Barths course was determined at every step by material theological decisions, and
he is exactly right. In what he affirms materially Barth is not modern, either in the
Kantian, nor the Hegelian, nor the Schleiermacherian sense.54 He opposes both the
material theological implications of the notion of the disengaged rational agent or
detached rationality, and the pantheism of Hegelian and Schleiermacherian
theories of immanence. His affirmation of the communal nature of humanity
opposes the former notion, his negative ecclesiology is, in part, a hedge against
the latter.
The second suggestion I would make is that these insights, if they qualify as
such, call for some new partners in dialogue with Barth, namely those Zeitgenossen
who are identified, in different ways, with the renewal of Roman Catholic theology
in the twentieth century after the period of Pianische monolithismus.55 Such
figures as Congar, de Lubac, Danielou, Bouyer and others were grappling with
many of the same issues as Barth and shared many of his concerns. Their response
to the state of Roman Catholicism at mid-century was somewhat parallel to Barths
response to the state of Protestantism after Schleiermacher: a return to the sources,
primarily the biblical text, but as read by the Fathers and medievals;56 a primary
interest in the material content of theology, founded on exegesis of the Bible, rather
than in its formal criteria; an emphasis on the church as a living organism, animated
by the Spirit of God; a decidedly negative attitude toward formalism and
sacramentalism; most importantly of all, a deep confidence in the power of the

53 Bruce McCormack, Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth:

Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, Zeitschrift fur dialektische Theologie 13
(1997), pp. 6795, 17094; idem, Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of
Theology, Scottish Journal of Theology 49 (1996), pp. 97109.
54 McCormack thinks Barth is important, at least in part, because he is Kantian; whereas,
Barths theology is important despite the fact that it is (in some respects) Kantian.
55 This description of Roman Catholic theology in the period from Pius IX to Pius XII is
attributed to Karl Rahner in Fergus Kerrs essay, A Catholic Response to the
Programme of Radical Orthodoxy, in Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry, ed.
Laurence Paul Hemming (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 55.
56 It is worth noting here Jean Danielous list of reasons why we love Karl Barth in his
letter in response to Barths speech to the World Council of Churches conference in
Amsterdam (see Gesprache nach Amsterdam). Barths explicit reliance on patristic
sources is limited. His work, however, invites comparison with a number of patristic
theologians, most notably in this context, Origen. For example, his approach to biblical
interpretation as a prayerful activity dependent on the activity of the Holy Spirit in the
church is in line with the kind of christocentric spiritual interpretation de Lubac found in
Origen and was eager to revive.
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Word of God to vindicate and assert itself. Barth had little contact with these
figures, but what contact he had, and what he knew of their careful research and
bold engagement in the debates of their time, provoked his excitement and even
astonishment.
The relation between Barth and at least the Nouvelle Theologie branch of
French Catholic theology is exploited by the advocates of Radical Orthodoxy,
especially John Milbank, who claim to carry on the project of la Nouvelle
Theologie.57 They find Barths theology to be founded upon a defective view of the
relation between theology and philosophy. Their critique of Barths approach to
natural and spiritual knowledge may have some justification. Nonetheless, perhaps
the exponents of Radical Orthodoxy have moved beyond Barth without having
heard him on precisely some of those points on which he is by no means passe,
namely the importance of maintaining a clear distinction between Christ and the
church while resolutely refusing to separate them. Such an attitude safeguards
theology from the danger that its own activity, particularly its liturgy, or the life of
the church, on which it necessarily reflects, might absorb the transcendent being
of Jesus Christ.58 Perhaps here further investigation of the broad agreements and
deep disagreements between Barth and his Catholic contemporaries might yet
prove fruitful.59

57
58
59

Radical Orthodoxy, eds. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward
(London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 14; John Milbank, The Programme of Radical
Orthodoxy, in Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry, pp. 337.
See R.R. Reno, The Radical Orthodoxy Project, First Things 100 (Feb. 2000), pp. 37
44.
On this, see the cross-questioning of Radical Othodoxys (really Milbanks) reading of
both Barth and la Nouvelle Theologie in John Hanvey, Conclusion: Continuing the
Conversation, in Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry, pp. 15563.
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