Christian Dogmatics — the church’s orderly understanding of scripture and articulation of doctrine in the light of Christ and their coherence in him.

Dogma — the church’s authoritative formulation of doctrine in accordance with apostolic teaching.[1]

As Barth works at developing his thinking on Revelation, as that relates to the Trinity, he once again underscores just how important the Protestant Scripture Principle is (and was) to the “proofing” of real Dogma versus what I’d like to call No-Dogma. For Barth Christian Dogmatics, theology in the main must start with God’s Revelation as that is attested to in Holy Scripture. But for Barth he first develops, in a dialectical way, an ontology for Holy Scripture prior to engaging with Scripture as Holy. In other words, Revelation itself, God’s life as revealed in Christ as the Triune Second, becomes the condition or the predicator of what is deposited in Scripture; in short: God’s Triune life is the res (reality) that allows Scripture to be an aspect of God’s Self-Revelation insofar as that Revelation finds its reality as it points beyond itself to Jesus Christ.

What this does in the “proofing” process, in regard to seeing if a so called Church dogma elevates to actual dogma, or in the end, descends to the status of no-dogma is that it allows Scripture and its reality to be the regulator for such determinations. In other words, it takes away any sort of self-proclaimed authority that something like the Roman Catholic church declares for itself in the teaching magisterium, on the one hand, and on the other it similarly mitigates modern theology’s reduction of spiritual authority to the ‘teaching’ magisteria of human reason, self discovery, and human experience (as those become conflated with Godself). Barth says a loud Nein! and simply calls the Christian back to the authority of God, as God’s own best exegete, and demonstrates how Holy Scripture itself is indeed holy precisely because of its givenness to us in Christ as God’s emissary of graciousness to meet us in our deep need for Him. For Barth, Holy Scripture is the Church’s authority, and beyond that it is her authority precisely because its root, its inner-reality is found in the eternally Triune life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in covenant for us as that became seeded in His free choice to become human for us that we might become like Him by the grace of the resurrected Christ. God is the authority for Barth, and Scripture has its ‘being’ and given order in relation to God’s choice to descend and meet us in the face of Christ; it is in this face (prosopon) that God’s voice speaks (loquitur) as we encounter Him on each page, in every iota of the blood stained ink used to pigment the vellum upon and through which it has been written.

Barth writes,

It thus follows that we cannot prove the truth of the dogma that I not as such in the Bible merely from the fact that it is a dogma, but rather from the fact that we can and must regard it as a good interpretation of the Bible. Later we shall have to show why it is that dogmas must be approached with some prejudgment in favour of their truth, with some very real respect for their relative, though not absolute, authority. But this includes rather excludes the fact that dogmatics has to prove dogma, i.e., to indicate its basis, its root in revelation or in the biblical witness to revelation. If dogma had no such root, if it could be shown that its rise was mostly due to eisegesis rather than exegesis, if, then, it could not be understood as analysis of revelation, it could not be recognised as dogma.

In this sense we cannot recognise as dogma a whole series of Roman Catholic dogmas, e.g., that if justification coincident with sanctification, or that of Mary, or that of purgatory, or that of the seven sacraments, or that of papal infallibility. As little, naturally, can we recognise as dogma the specific dogmas of Protestant Modernism such as that of the historical development of revelation or that of the continuity between God and man in religions experience. We fail to detect the “root” that these teachings would have to have in revelation or its biblical attestation to be able to be dogmas.[2]

The “root” for Barth is God; God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God has chosen that Scripture be Holy precisely as it becomes the ground upon which the burning bush shines forth brightly in the eyes of the Lamb which are like fire (cf. Rev. 1:14). It is as we encounter God’s voice in Scripture that we can come to discern between the holy and the unholy (cf. Lev. 10); at which point we can move beyond the milk, and begin feasting on the meatier things of WHO God is (cf. Heb. 5:11-14). For Barth it is all about Who God is before thinking about what and that God is. And this is the “root” of Holy Scripture, as its reality, and thus authority for all those who will come to God in Christ. This is why for Barth God is not simply the object, but also, and we might add, antecedently, the subject of theological reality. For Barth it’s not possible or desirable to disentangle a theology of the Word, from the eternal Logos; instead he is constantly concerned with underscoring the fact that without the Living God, without the Living God descending to us in Christ, there is no context for Scripture to be Scripture; indeed there is no context for creation to be creation. But the choice is God’s; He, according to Barth, has elected to be for us by becoming us, and in this becoming Scripture becomes Holy just as it becomes the vocalization of God’s voice for us as the church militant.

Unfortunately, I’d suggest, many North American evangelicals (and more broadly) have taken up the mantle of what Barth calls ‘Protestant Modernism.’ Evangelicals, in the main, by sublimating God’s voice with their own (in other words, conflating their voice as God’s voice cf. Feuerbach’s critique on ‘projection’) have rendered their lives authority-less based upon no-dogma. While they often pay lip service to Scripture as their authority, because of their abandonment of critical and constructive theological thinking, they are unable to recognize that Scripture has ‘authority’ not because they say so, but because God has made it so as Scripture’s “root” and inner-reality. Scripture is not the evangelical’s possession; nein, the evangelical, along with the rest of humanity have been bought with the blood of Jesus Christ (cf. I Cor. 6:18-19). This thinking needs to bleed through into the evangelical’s idea about Scripture. The best place to start for the evangelical is to become saturated in Holy Scripture; in other words, “quiet times” aren’t sufficient. If we are to hear God’s voice we need to be listening, and we can’t do that if we don’t have the stereo of God’s Word playing in our hearts and mind in a meditative practice moment by moment. God help us!

[1] T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, edited by Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2008), Glossary.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1§8, 16.