Scientia Dei (Part Two): Karl Barth

God is not a separate and rival agent in the universe.  The creative causal power of God does not operate on me from outside, as an alternative to me; it is the creative causal power of God that makes me

                                                                        Herbert McCabe[i]

Christopher Hitchens, whose tongue is apparently nowhere in his cheek [writes] “thanks to the telescope and the microscope [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important.”  It would be hard to construct a more idiotic sentence, at least without an amazing amount of concerted effort.

Conor Cunningham[ii]

In order to do justice to the credo hammered into every bible student, I should say here, too, it is the context that counts and allows us to better understand the presuppositions and thought worlds from which our two target theologians emerged.  We must, so to speak, get a running start to make it through the vast territories covered by Pannenberg and Torrance.  With this in mind, the particular situations I have chosen to set the scene with, namely Karl Barth and the debates he had are by no means set forth as a proposal indicating that these are the only, or perhaps even the primary, contextual influences on either Torrance or Pannenberg’s thought.[iii]  While other influences on both thinkers will be mentioned ad hoc as our discussion proceeds, the choice of this particular setting of Barth and his opponents nonetheless has heuristic value for our purposes for at least two reasons. 

First, the particular controversies I have chosen illustrate well some of the basic issues at stake in the formulation of a scientific theology in dialogue with the other sciences.  In particular the Barth-Scholz debate illustrates the conflict between two views of theology as a science which, even if in radically altered form, continue to inform more contemporary discussions.  Even this minor detail up front should cloud the clarity of any discussion which trades upon a simple science vs theology schema because the question is not science or theology, but whose theology? Which science?  Second, not only is Karl Barth held by many to be the most influential theologian since Schleiermacher, considered by some to even be a modern day church father,[iv] but even more than this both Torrance and Pannenberg were direct students of Barth.  Both their similarities and differences from one another regarding our area of investigation into the theme of scientific theology in their thought can be illuminated by shedding light upon the ways they have chosen to accept, reject, or modify the positions of their mentor.[v]  Useful to keep in mind as we get into these discussions are two distinct (but not separate) issues that attend a scientific theology: what this means for methodological questions (i.e. how is investigation in a scientific theology to proceed? What is its domain? What is/are its object(s)? How do theological statements originate? How do such statements interrelate and what is their overall structure? and so on[vi]) and relational questions (i.e. how does theology relate to other bodies of knowledge such as philosophy or the sciences?).

            The background context to the emergence of Barth’s theology is itself, of course, quite famous, but it will be helpful to briefly repeat it.  Barth found in his neo-Protestant Liberal mentors an inadequate theology that bore an equally inadequate distinction between man and God.  Barth frequently criticized many of his mentors and the tradition they emerged from for turning the gospel into “a religious message that tells humans of their own divinity instead of recognizing it as the Word of God, a message that humans are incapable of anticipating or comprehending because it comes from a God utterly distinct from them.”[vii] The Liberal view of God not only robbed God of His transcendence and truth, but it was particularly open to the charges of the left-wing Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), that all talk of God is simply misunderstood or projected talk about mankind.[viii]  Theology, in other words, is really a misunderstood anthropology speaking about man’s own infinity,[ix]  or in Barth’s famous humorous phrase, talking about God became reduced to talking about man “in a really loud voice.”  This confusion, in Barth’s eyes, was not only idolatrous, but fueled the “theology of compromise,” between Hitler and the German churches, who easily conflated God’s ordinances with their own.[x] It was in an attempt to overcome theological Liberalism and the fear both of the idolatry of God through manmade concepts, and the divinization of man, that led Barth to reemphasize “the objectively real Self-Speaking of God in revelation”[xi] to use Bruce McCormack’s helpful characterization. 

More relevant to the immediate concern of this essay, the general trajectory of Barth’s thought which emerged from the above context was also sharpened in response to a challenge from the historian and friend of Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Overbeck, which Neil MacDonald in his illuminating recent book calls Overbeck’s “metatheological dilemma.”[xii]  Overbeck perceived the same thing Barth did in neo-Protestant Liberalism, namely that it was merely talking about man in a loud voice; the difference was that Overbeck accepted it and his conclusion amounted to the charge that, if theology was to retain intellectual integrity and honesty, it should now just admit its own redundancy.  All theology was, in other words, “non-theology,” which is to say “theology was no longer an autonomous subject; every truth formerly cited as an example of theology was either in fact meaningless, or a function of, and hence reducible to, a truth of non-theology (natural philosophy, physics, history, anthropology, etc.); there were simply no more truths theology could claim as its own.”[xiii]  Thus MacDonald argues that the theology of Barth from the second edition of his Commentary on Romans forward, was to a major extent a defense and response to this meta-theological dilemma:[xiv] or in terms more apropos to this essay, over the scientific status of theology and it relation to other sciences.  And here we see an issue which rebounds heavily, though is not often noticed, upon contemporary discussion regarding the supposed war of science and theology: what is theology?  What is science?  

Barth contended fiercely that one cannot know God by observing nature, or by peering into one’s own self, rather only God may reveal God.  This was the core to theology’s autonomy from reduction and dissolution into other disciplines.  The Trinity is thus not (as it is for Paul Tillich,[xv] for example) a historically contingent way to know God, it is instead the only authentic point of access: “The possibility of knowledge of God’s Word lies in God’s Word and nowhere else,”[xvi] indeed revelation in Jesus Christ and the Spirit “is the self-interpretation of this God.  If we are dealing with His revelation, we are dealing with God Himself, and not…with an entity distinct from Him.”[xvii]  To stop short and say that revelation is the fundamental prerequisite to know the Triune God is not a sufficient characterization of Barth’s theology, however, because nearly every Christian would admit as much.  What distinguishes Barth’s view is that revelation itself is fundamentally Trinitarian in character.  The Trinitarian character of God, and of revelation, constitute the distinctively Christian notions of both concepts.[xviii]  This is the reason that Barth made a move fairly unprecedented in modern theology up to that point[xix] to place the Trinitarian doctrine of God in the prolegomena of his Church Dogmatics rather than presenting it in its traditional place after the prolegomena had unfolded and an independent doctrine of revelation, scripture, and doctrine of God’s essence and attributes had been established. God is the Revealer, the Revealed, and the act of Revelation itself.  And even in being known by man, God remains sovereign over this act of knowledge as the one who initiates it, sustains it, and makes it possible.[xx] He remains both Subject and Object.  In the helpful summary of another of Barth’s famous students, Eberhard Jüngel puts it thus:

As object of the knowledge of God, God differentiates himself from all other epistemological objects precisely in his being-as-object, which cannot be defined in terms of the objectivity of other objects.  And in that in his being-as-object God differentiates himself from all other objects of human knowledge, he himself also differentiates the human person who knows God in his or her being-subject from all other ways in which the human person as knowing subject stands over against an object that is to be known.[xxi]

            Thus the emphasis in all this is that knowledge of God via His revelation of Himself is unique in regards to our objective knowledge of other things and our being-subject to other things (other human beings for example) by the mode of its origin, its medium of transmission, and its reception.  Even if He truly makes Himself known in revelation, God does not, so to speak, give Himself over to the caprice of the human receptor or her capacity for analogical imagination to do with as she pleases.  God gives Himself, but does not give Himself away, as Barth is fond of putting it.  In this respect Barth is ironically close to the Liberal theology he sought to reject, insofar as neither allowed that history could change the timeless essence of Christianity, and both wanted to describe Jesus Christ in such a way that his significance for the church would not wax and wane with the continually altering landscape of historical scholarship.[xxii]

It is this unrelenting thrust of Barth’s thought that is also the engine driving the various debates with his opponents and which subsequently defined his basic attitude both to theology as a science, and its relationship to other fields of scientific discipline.  Thus, in my opinion, Barth’s various debates with Heinrich Scholz, Erich Przywara, Emil Brunner, and others are all diverse representations and outcomes of this basic aspect and for our purposes may be presented together as symptoms from a common root.  In all instances, despite diverse manifestations and results, what Barth appears to perceive in his opponents is an attempt to circumvent the implications of God revealing Himself, as we outlined above, as the sole and fundamental criteria for a legitimate scientific theology.

            Hence when in 1931 Heinrich Scholz wrote an article dealing with the question of whether Protestant theology could be considered a science, and laid down what he considered to be three general or universal criteria for any scientific endeavor,[xxiii] Barth rejected these outright.[xxiv]  This was not because he rejected the term “science” as applied to theology, however.  In fact Scholz’ article itself had been prompted by Barth’s previous insistence that Christian theology was “scientific” (wissenschaftlich), but in the sense that its methodological inquiry was appropriate to, and hence dictated by, the object of its inquiry.  Indeed the opening statement to his Dogmatics in Outline is “Dogmatics is a science,” by which he means “an attempt to see, to hear, and to state definite facts, to survey and coordinate these facts, to present them in the form of doctrine,” and this is all controlled by the object and the sphere of activity, namely God’s self-revelation.[xxv] The Barth-Scholz debate was not one between a scientific and a non-scientific account of theology, but between two theologies claiming different scientific criterion, “scientific,” here seeming to mean definite methodological criteria whereby theological statements could be created and judged. 

Barth had originally advanced his definition of scientific theology against the neo-Kantian Hans Heinrich Wendt, who, as neo-Kantians prided themselves in doing, argued that scientific method was an invariable  a priori criteria of inquiry indifferent to the subject matter and hence universal to all intellectual disciplines.[xxvi]  We see in this neo-Kantianism Kant’s own self-imposed dilemma: either it is the object which furnishes the conception of itself, or it is our concepts which define and so produce the object.[xxvii]  Thus for the neo-Kantians who in varying ways threw themselves upon the second horn of the dilemma argued that, regardless of the object—whether one wanted to know the mass of Jupiter or a spouse’s birthday wish—the method of investigation would remain identical.  Yet for Barth—for many reasons, including the metatheological dilemma—revelation could answer to no other authority because its reality and objectivity were dictated by God Himself.[xxviii]  Man could gain no true access to God—as in fact this would contradict the very idea of God—and thus if theology is to be scientific, i.e. a manner of inquiry seeking the truth of its object, it could lay down no a priori demands of validation but had at all times to maintain the priority of God in His revelation as recorded in scripture.  Barth’s definition of a scientific theology coincides with his particular doctrine of God. 

As such McGrath aptly summarizes that Barth saw “Christian theology and the natural sciences [and by extension the human sciences] as non-interactive disciplines, each with their respective fields of competence”[xxix] while simultaneously viewing theology as a science.  Science as such, for Barth, means an investigation whose manner of inquiry was appropriate to the objectivity of the thing or field being examined.  On the other hand, an investigation would be summarily unscientific for Barth if methods of inquiry specific to one domain of knowledge were transferred to another domain.  One does not, so to speak, use a Geiger counter to measure faith. The observation needs to be made however that at a meta-scientific or theoretical level all sciences, even for Barth, do have the same approach and same formal structure.[xxx]  Paradoxically the unilateral identity of that structure itself demands that each field of investigation maintains a unique and unrepeatable form of inquiry stylized and conformed to the nature or ontology of the things being investigated; Inter-disciplinary dialogue, at the very least between theology and the other disciplines, appears by this logic to be ruled out in theory since they would constitute non-overlapping magisteria.[xxxi] 

The same logic[xxxii] drives Barth’s famous attacks on Emil Brunner’s supposed natural theology and Erich Przywara’s revitalization of the anologia entis (analogy of being).  Here what comes to fore is that a truly scientific theology would not just have proper methodological concerns but also spiritual or moral ones which correlate with those methodological considerations (which makes sense, given that God is its object).  Science in relation to theology now takes on a fully orbed meaning, encompassing both proper method and proper spiritual orientation.[xxxiii]  We will see this emphasis continued in Torrance.  Barth’s rejection of natural theology and the analogy of being are not “merely” methodological concerns, but implicate the moral existence of the Christian before God (and this perhaps explains the tempestuous manner he deals with both Brunner and Przywara).  Natural theology and the analogy of being relate in Barth’s view to the attempt at autonomy by the individual.  Natural theology is defined as an inquiry “where we must allow nature to tell us what is good.”  But, continues Barth, “has not man in fact asked himself, and himself given the answer he apparently really wished to hear from some other source?”[xxxiv]  Paralleling this account of natural theology as essentially self-fulfillment and autonomy, McCormack notes of Barth’s view of sin:

That the target he had in view was the ‘modern’ idealistic conception of consciousness as structured by the autonomous generation (and realization) of tasks.  Where for the theologians of the Ritschlian school (as well as for neo-Kantian philosophy) the development of the ‘free’ (which is to say, autonomous) personality is synonymous with the creation of an ethical agent, for Barth, the desire for autonomy is the original sin.[xxxv]

            Any attempt of human understanding, for Barth, was thus construed along the lines of his German Idealist heritage as a construction of a self-sufficient ego attempting to preserve itself and orientate itself in a moral and intellectual space of its own creation.[xxxvi]  We must keep this in mind as we reach Pannenberg, for he questions this aspect of Barth’s Idealist heritage.  For now we can reiterate that the emphasis of the objectivity of God in the act of His revelation was meant by Barth as a counter to the self-justifications of man, as we have seen, and to interrupt the enclosed architecture of the ego by orienting it extra nos, or outside of itself to God’s own reality. Emil Brunner in fact felt he was an ally in this endeavor, and was a tireless enemy of “attempting to grasp God with natural reason independent of revelation or to make any sort of human philosophy the necessary framework for understanding God’s word.”[xxxvii]   Yet when Brunner wrote in 1934 that “the Word of God could not reach a man who had lost his consciousness of God entirely…[even if this consciousness of God] may be very confused or distorted.  Even so it is the necessary, indispensable point of contact for divine grace,”[xxxviii] Barth could only react to the concept of “point of contact” with a disgusted “NO!” and accuse Brunner of giving aid to the “theology of compromise” fueling the Nazi ideology of Germany.[xxxix]  To Barth this natural theology could not but appear to posit a second source of revelation—and by Barth’s definitions a source of human self-justification—and contradict his fundamentally Trinitarian principle that proper theological science has only a single source of revelation of God in Christ.

Or consider when Erich Przywara reconceived a dynamic concept of the analogy of being (anologia entis) based on the doctrine of creation, positing a “created capacity” on the part of analogies to model God in human language and concepts (while maintaining the infinite distinction between God and world).  Barth, apparently channeling the bluster of Luther, wrote “I regard the analogia entis as the invention of the anti-Christ.”[xl]  Much like Brunner’s natural theology, Barth perceived in any theological account finding its source in some innate ability to speak of God or view creation as His analogue, an open door to human self justification, and, in historical context, the Nazi regime’s ideology.  In contrast to this Barth offered as his own alternative what he termed the anologia fidei or analogy of faith, which followed quite closely to the logic Barth had been developing all along,[xli] namely that any analogy between human language and the reality of God is grounded in Divine decision, and is elicited by the free revelation of God in Christ, rather than by human enquiry from a consideration of the created order.[xlii]  “We can meet God only within the limits of the humanity determined by Him.”[xliii]  The only “point of contact” between God and world was through Jesus Christ.[xliv]  All analogies and talk of God were necessarily controlled by being generated through a Trinitarian understanding of God by the Son incarnate in the flesh, sent from the Father and empowered by the Spirit.  Any autonomous analogy of being, or natural theology, would not have this Trinitarian character and so would lead, according to Barth, to the monstrosity of a faceless God,[xlv] or the abstract One of Aristotle, and at any rate would merely be reflective of man’s sinful artifice rather than giving any inkling of the true God.

Let us summarize this section.  What Barth means by a scientific theology is, as a science, theology must operate with methodology appropriate to its object of inquiry, namely God.  As only God can reveal God, and in fact has revealed Himself as Lord in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the giving of the Spirit, the objective scientific method of inquiry is to maintain the priority of God and so to understand Him only by the event of his revelation, the Incarnation. Thus, while a somewhat brutal and simplistic summary, we have the first of the two distinct components I mentioned we should keep in mind: questions of methodology.  And to summarize the second component, namely the relation of theology as a science to other scientific disciplines:  Barth rules out, on theological (and ontological) grounds, any independently achieved knowledge of God by analysis of nature (and so, correspondingly, an inquiry into the natural sciences) or of any “natural” capacity of language and creation to create or sustain analogies of God (and so, correspondingly, would seem to limit interaction with philosophy of science, or philosophy in general).  This does not mean, we should note in due fairness to the magisterial complexity of Barth’s thought, that God cannot or does not use creation as a witness.  Barth famously wrote “God may speak to us through Russian communism, through a flute concerto, through a blossoming shrub or through a dead dog.  We shall do well to listen to him if he really does so…God may speak to us through a pagan or an atheist…”[xlvi]

The point is that these structures have no intrinsic capacity to communicate God to us, and such communication cannot thus be discerned, anticipated, or coaxed from them through human intellectual constructs.  Barth would probably respond to Richard Dawkins and the like much in the same way Terry Eagleton (who is, I might add, also an atheist) did recently, that to see religion as a failed scientific attempt to explain the world, is “much like seeing ballet as merely a botched attempt to run for the bus.”[xlvii]  Both are forms of locomotion, that is to say, forms of movement—but it hardly does any justice to confuse them (though to be fair, if it happened to be true they were the same, it would save me from actually going to the ballet).  So too both religion—or to put it more precisely, Christianity—and the various sciences, in Barth’s view, are indeed alike as systematic inquiries, but within respective fields of competence.  Waiting for the bus on the ballet stage will most likely just make you late for dinner.  What we have is a view very similar to the famous evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould: science is a good thing.  Theology is a good thing—they are both good things, in their own way.  They are not at war.  They should act more like polite acquaintances do: realizing they have nothing in common, when they do happen to get together they should only make small talk about other things instead of blabbing on and on about their day jobs.[xlviii]

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[i] Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Cassel, 1987) p.13.

[ii] Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea p.304.

[iii] I would here like to humbly acknowledge that I approach neither Torrance, nor Pannenberg as an expert on either one or the other. Given the immensity of the works of both thinkers, I have been greatly helped by reading through several excellent introductions to the works and themes of both theologians.  The body of second-hand introductory literature is itself incredibly vast, so I here refer only to works I myself have read through and which have influenced my discussion here.  For T.F. Torrance see: Elmer M. Colyer, How To Read T.F. Torrance: Understanding His Trinitarian and Scientific Theology (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001) especially p.35-55 for background context; Paul D. Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009) esp. p.1-31 again for biography and intellectual context; above all the excellent intellectual biography of Alister McGrath, T.F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography (New York: T&T Clark, 1999).  For Pannenberg see: F. LeRon Shults The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Rationality. (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1999) which is primarily a commentary on Pannenberg’s method in relation to Shults’ own elaboration of a post-foundationalist epistemology and hermeneutic; Stanley Grenz Reason For Hope: The Systematic Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2005) which remains the best overall introduction to Pannenberg’s thought; Christaan Mostert, God and the Future: Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Eschatological Doctrine of God (New York: T&T Clark, 2002) for a brilliant and lengthy elaboration on Pannenberg’s theme of eschatological ontology; Cornelius A. Buller. The Unity of Nature and History in Pannenberg’s Theology (Maryland: Littlefield Adams Books, 1996) for the complex but holistic themes of the interaction of God, world, and man in Pannenberg.  Several recent books incorporating Pannenberg and his relation to scientific investigation unfortunately came to my attention too late to be incorporated into this essay but nonetheless bare mentioning: Christopher L. Fisher, Human Significance in Theology and the Natural Sciences: An Ecumenical Perspective with Reference to Pannenberg, Rahner, and Zizioulas (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2010) and the less recent Beginning with the End: God, Science, and Wolfhart Pannenberg ed. Carol Albright and Joel Haugen (Illinois: Carus Publishing, 1997) which is a compilation of essays of Pannenberg and several other theologians and scientists interacting with those essays, and a response by Pannenberg.  It should be noted that several of the essays by Pannenberg in this volume have been published elsewhere.

[iv] Stanley Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2004) p.34.

[v] It should be noted again, however, that this is both a helpful and an unhelpful way to frame the discussion.  Pannenberg and Torrance’s positions should not in reality be understood merely in relation to continuation, deviation, or modification of fundamentally Barthian positions.  The limitation of the setting of context to Barth and his discussions as a heuristic to help understand Torrance and Pannenberg is helpful for the two reasons mentioned in the body of this work, but also contains a potentially misleading way of looking at things latent within the necessary evil of simply not having the room to elaborate on other key historical, social, theological, and philosophical relationships which enable a richer overall texture to emerge.

[vi] These questions are derived from Wentzel van Huyssteen Theology and the Justification of Faith: Constructing Theories in Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1989) p.xii-xiv, 71-73.

[vii] Stanley Grenz and Roger E. Olson, 20^th Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1992) p.67.

[viii] Barth’s theology is notoriously complex and the overall shape and evolution within his work are, of course, a hotly debated subject upon which I certainly do not have the expertise to comment on, and it would be, for our purposes beside the point.  In relation to Feuerbach’s influence on Barth, however, there appears in the secondary literature to be two main positions not entirely at odds with one another. The first considers an anti-Feuerbachian polemic to be both substantial and formative to Barth’s theology.  Thus Joseph C. Weber, “Feuerbach, Barth, and Theological Methodology,” in Journal of Religion 46 (1966), p.24-36 and W. Waite Willis, Theism, Atheism, and the Doctrine of the Trinity: The Trinitarian Theologies of Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann in Response to Protest Atheism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987) e.g. p.27 find Feuerbach to be a fundamental factor in Barth’s material theological formulations.  The second group believes that Barth uses Feuerbach more as a helpful symbol or launching platform for a rejection of the entire modern, experientially-based theological tradition, of whom Feuerbach is the logical development and conclusion.  The anthropological turn in theology, rather than atheism per se, is thus Barth’s target.  Thus the presentations of Manfred H. Vogel, “The Barth-Feuerbach Confrontation,” in Harvard Theological Review 59 (1966) p.27-52, John Glasse, “Barth on Feuerbach,” in Harvard Theological Review 57, (1964), p.69-96 and more recently Samuel M. Powell, The Trinity in German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) are more disposed to this view.  Either way the importance of both groups is that they acknowledge how Barth’s theology is fundamentally indebted to the prevalent idea that human thought and intellectual constructions were antithetical to truly knowing God, either in the sense of idolatry or atheism.  Thus we have the radical objectivity of the Word of God as subject, object, and medium of transmission in order to secure itself from the opacity and dilution of human intellectual constructs.  Barth’s relation and solution to Feuerbach’s dilemma will become more important as we turn to Pannenberg’s method, which is both fundamentally concerned with Feuerbach’s assertion and dissatisfied with Barth’s solution.

[ix] A helpful examination of some of the logic behind Feuerbach’s argument that theology is anthropology, and its theological background, can be found in Eberhard Jüngel.  God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism.  Trans. Darrel L. Guder.  (Grand Rapids, Eerdman’s Publishing Co. 1983) 141ff.

[x] Scholz’ three demands were: 1.) In any science besides questions and definitions, there can only be propositions whose truth is asserted, and whose minimum requirement is a lack of contradiction.  2.) All propositions must cohere and be related to a single field of study.  3.) Control: all theological statements must be testable.  It should be noted that though it is slightly odd Barth rejected these outright, as in some sense they would have been fine within his thought, Scholz nonetheless was still operating within a positivist mode of thought and that is the controlling context for his criteria.

[xi] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) p.9.

[xii] Neil B. MacDonald Karl Barth and the Strange New World Within the Bible: Barth, Wittgenstein, and the Meta-dilemmas of the Enlightenment (Georgia: Paternoster Press, 2000)

[xiii] Ibid p.13.

[xiv] Ibid p.53.

[xv] Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1951-1963) Tillich rejected that revelation is a giving of information about God, thus for him there is a distinction between the form of revelation (e.g. Father, Son, Holy Spirit) and the content the revelation is trying to express.  The form/content distinction drives his distinction between revelation and doctrine.  Doctrine, based on theology, gives logical and essential expression to the content expressed in revelation (III:286) thus in criticizing the literalist and historically contingent form of Orthodox Trinitarianism in its view of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Tillich, much akin to Bultmann, did not believe he was rejecting the content of revelation, merely a non-necessary form of its expression, in order to make way for a more perspicacious rendering of the three-fold experience of God.  The form/content distinction is precisely the thing that Barth would reject and which is a formative element in the way he decides to treat theology as a science which follows the distinct form of God’s self-revelation.

[xvi] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1 The Doctrine of the Word of God, Part 1, transl. Geoffery W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975) p.222.  Hereafter abbreviated CD with volume number.

[xvii] Ibid p.311.

[xviii] Ibid p.301.

[xix] Regarding the Trinitarianism that led up to Barth in the two preceding centuries, see the excellent and underrated analyses of Claude Welch, In This Name: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Contemporary Theology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952).

[xx] Paul Molnar, “The Function of the Immanent Trinity in the Theology of Karl Barth: Implications for Today,” in The Scottish Journal of Theology 42 no.3 1989, p.367-400 explores how this theme plays out in Barth and how it relates to many other contemporary attempts at Trinitarianism, particularly Karl Rahner.

[xxi] Eberhard Jüngel God’s Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth trans. John Webster (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2001) p.56.

[xxii] Powell, The Trinity in German Thought p.164; Jüngel, God’s Being is in Becoming p.34 also suggests along the same lines that “Barth accorded to his doctrine of the Trinity the same function which the programme of demythologization performs in the theology of Rudolph Bultmann.”  He goes on to explain: “If we understand Bultmann’s programme as the concern for appropriate speech about God (and so about humanity), and if we see this concern fulfilled in not objectifying God or letting him be objectified as an It or He, but in bringing him to speech as Though, and so speaking of him appropriately then we shall not overlook a striking parallel to the significance which Barth attributes (and gives) to the doctrine of the Trinity…the task of the doctrine of the Trinity, according to Barth, is precisely to comprehend the subject of revelation as the subject who remains indissolubly subject in His revelation.” (34-35).

[xxiii] Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (No Location: C.D. Deans, 1960) p.14.

[xxiv] Due to none of Scholz’s works being translated into English, I am indebted to accounts of his work presented in Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology vol. 2: Reality (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2002) p.285-290; Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science p.265-276; Wentzel van Huyssteen, Theology and the Justification of Faith: Constructing Theories in Systematic Theology trans. F. H. Snijders (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1989) p.11-24, and of course Barth’s own brief reaction to Scholz’s demands in CD 1/1 p.8-9.

[xxv] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper & Row, 1959) p.9.

[xxvi] McGrath, Reality p.286.

[xxvii] Immanuel Kant The Critique of Pure Reason trans. J. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press) e.g. 2^nd ed. p.xvi; p.125: “either the object alone must make representations possible or the representation alone make the object possible.”

[xxviii] McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology p.75 argues this indicates that Barth is still in fact indebted to the neo-Kantian framework even if he is slowly moving away from it.

[xxix] McGrath, T.F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography p.196.

[xxx] Barth, Dogmatics in Outline p.9.

[xxxi] Yet de facto Barth is actually quite engaged with philosophy and historical investigation, if not the natural sciences.  For a nuanced approach to this see: John C. McDowell, “A Response to Rodney Holder On Barth On Natural Theology,” in Themelios vol.27:2 p.32-44, e.g. “Barth uses philosophy eclectically in the service of theology, while intending to take care not to allow it to undermine or overwhelm the particularity of theology’s witness to God in Christ.” (42).

[xxxii] McGrath, Scientific Theology vol.1 Nature p.268 notes that while it is perfectly natural to view Barth’s revulsion to natural theology as at least implicit in Barth’s early theology, it was not until CD II/1 §26 that Barth extended a systematic critique of natural theology.

[xxxiii] Without wanting to present Barth as a “postmodern,” this idea of spiritual or moral orientation, tied as it is to Barth’s ecclesiology, indicates that a fully scientific theology cannot be “objective” in the sense of “neutral” or “without commitment,” because the very nature of proper relation to God’s word is the transformative spiritual life which goes along with it.  This is probably quite different than the postmodern emphasis on tradition and community, since the whole discussion remains within the purview of Barth’s “actualistic ontology,” where “community,” and “tradition,” are not autonomous entities, or even capable of revealing God per se except insofar as they take part in the event of God’s own self revelation.  Nonetheless at this point we can appreciate that Barth has in his appropriation of  the term  “scientific” already overcome the Enlightenment ideal of science as neutral enquiry.

[xxxiv] As quoted by D. Stephen Long, Speaking of God: Theology, Language, and Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2009) p.102.

[xxxv] McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology p.167.

[xxxvi] One might speculate in addition to this that similar to Bultmann’s applications of the theme of justification by faith to the realm of thought so that we have no “objectifying knowledge” (i.e. facts demonstrated by historical inquiry, which Bultmann equated with “works” traditionally understood) but can only be confronted by the sheer fact of the existential kerygma of God (i.e. grace) so that “we are [in regards to faith] in a vacuum, so to speak” that Barth is working within a similar modification of the faith/works binary.

[xxxvii] Grenz and Olson, 20^th Century Theology p.79.

[xxxviii] Emil Brunner, Natural Theology, Comprising ‘Nature and Grace’ and the Reply ‘No!” by Dr. Karl Barth trans. Peter Fraenkel (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002) p.32-33.

[xxxix] Ibid p.71-72.  Barth’s somewhat venomous reaction should be mitigated somewhat by being placed in the highly unstable political context of the time, where Barth viewed the Nazi ideology as itself a sort of “natural theology” justifying Aryan supremacy and, with Troeltsch’s historicism, the movements of the German state as essentially the providential movement of God.  Barth was no bully, but was very concerned with what he saw going on around him.  Whether Brunner was a proper outlet for this anxiety or not, though, I am in no place of expertise to judge. It is worth observing that in the stringency of his point Barth sharply departs from Calvin and a major stream of Reformed thought on this account.

[xl] Barth, CD I/1 xiii.

[xli] McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology p.14-23 notes that Barth’s analogia fidei, despite the early theses of Torrance and von Balthasar on Barth, did not actually displace the earlier dialectical themes of the younger Barth’s work.  Thus there was no “turn” from dialectic to analogy.

[xlii] Barth, CD I/1 p.340.

[xliii] Barth, The Humanity of God p.54.

[xliv] Once again Jüngel’s analysis is helpful.  See his God’s Being is in Becoming p.17-27 for an analysis of Barth’s concept of the vestigium trinitatis (vestiges of the trinity) in creation (p.20n.25 is in itself particularly helpful) and God as the Mystery p.261-281 for a brief philosophical history of analogy, and 281-298 for an analysis of the analogia fidei and the gospel as analogous talk about God.  Jüngel differs from Barth in that he views the latter as too critical of Przywara and the analogia entis, but he also provides a careful evaluation. Clearly in this essay I have not begun to do justice to the complexity of either concept.

[xlv] Barth CD I/2 p.92.

[xlvi] Barth CD I/1 p.60.

[xlvii] Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) p.50.

[xlviii] Which explains in Alister McGrath’s words, why “Barth appeared to have very little genuine knowledge of the working methods and assumptions of the sciences.” (T.F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography p.196).