Continuing on with what has come to be a theme of my last many posts, I want to continue to visit the idea of Church authority. I am working my way through Barth’s Church Dogmatics (linearly), and am currently at the end of I/2§21. In this section Barth is delineating the way he sees the Church’s authority vis-à-vis the ‘Freedom of the Word of God.’ Barth’s two targets are Roman Catholicism, and what he calls ‘NeoProtestantism,’ respectively; his reference to the latter has to do with the theological liberal tradition he was birthed into, and yet came to repudiate (which his CD does in magnanimous ways). He offers much development prior to what we will read from him here, but I think the quote I offer captures much of what he has developed, thus far, in a summative sort of form. You will notice the strong critique he makes against Roman Catholic ecclesiology, and the authority he thinks they presume upon as the topos of God’s voice for the world. And so, you now know that we will only focus on Barth’s critique of Roman Catholicism authority rather than his critique of NeoProtestantism. Even so, it should be noted, that the principle he is using to make his critique is the same for both the Tridentine as it is for the Teuton Church; it is just applied uniquely one way rather than the other, and vice versa. Let’s read along with Barth, and then we will highlight some of the points that stand out most significantly; at least what I think is most significant in regard to his critique. As usual, the quote will be longish, but bear with me; and Barth. Herr Barth writes:

This must be particularly remembered in the polemical use of these ideas. It is a temptation, too great a temptation, to say that in the reference to freedom we have the specifically Protestant answer to the that question, in direct opposition to Catholicism. We can only issue a warning against this idea. It will fare ill with the Protestant Church if it is more protestant to speak of freedom than of authority, if the demagogic notion is true that in the last resort the aim of the Reformers was to enthrone the reason and conscience of the individual as opposed to the authority and judgment of the Church, that they were, therefore, the forerunners of Pietism, the Enlightenment and Idealism. It is true that, confronted by an authority that was no longer a real, divine or genuinely ecclesiastical authority, they proclaimed the freedom of the Christian man as a free lord of all things and subject to no one. But how can one fail to see that by this very proclamation they were, in fact, fighting on precisely the opposite front? As though Luther did not see in the enthusiasm of his time, to which all the later forms of liberalism are traceable, the same enemy as in the Papacy! How can we fail to observe that, according to Luther, the same Christian man is the slave of all things and subject to everyone? As though Calvin did not do more for the recognition of the authority of God and the Church than all the mediaeval popes and Scholastics put together! The Church of the Reformation, provided it does not allow itself to be confused by that demagogic apologetic, need not wait to be reminded by Roman Catholic polemical writers that through an ill-considered affirmation of the principle of freedom it will inevitably fall into heresy and become a sect. Neither in origin nor in essence it is in any way involved in the impasse in which the free individual is suddenly to be the measure of all things. To go no further, how can this optimism be combined with the Reformers’ insight into the wretchedness of man, and his incapacity to know God and to do the good? This part of Reformation theology has had to be prudently erased for the Reformers to be represented and extolled as the fathers of the modern aspirations after freedom. Still more fundamentally, the Evangelical view of the unique glory and saving power of the divine Word excludes the possibility of attaching to Protestantism even the intention or preparation of those aspirations after freedom. By all means let Catholicism fight for authority against freedom in its opposition to all kinds of other heresies. But in opposition to Catholicism itself we do not have to espouse first the cause of freedom, but of authority, and only then and from that standpoint freedom. For with its doctrine of the unity of the Church and revelation (together with its doctrine of nature and grace), it has attributed to man a freedom and capacity side by side with God and over God. So, then, it has really given birth to all the other heresies—however hostile it may be to them. It has made them necessary as opponents on its own level. It has destroyed the recognition of the authority of God, and in so doing—in spite of clericalism—it has destroyed that of a genuine ecclesiastical authority. That is our decisive charge against it. It is also true that with this destruction of authority it has also destroyed the freedom of the mind and conscience, the necessary freedom offered to the individual member of the Church. But how can this be understood and seriously maintained if it is not perceived and maintained first that Roman Catholicism is rebellion against the authority of the Word of God, rebellion against canonical Scripture, rebellion against the fathers too, and against every genuine confession? When at the Reformation the Word of God re-established its rule in the tottering Church, “Catholicism” refused to obey it, and continued to destroy the Church; not by knowing too much, but by knowing too little about authority, by making new opportunities and new forms for the arbitrary freedom of man to manipulate the Word of God according to its convenience. Therefore the Evangelical Church must not take its stand where according to Roman Catholic theory it ought to be, especially when it has to represent true evangelical freedom over against that theory. It must not define this libertas Christiana as the inner independence of the soul which is bound immediately and exclusively to God, as though it did not realise how short a step it is from this independence to its counterpart in the form of papal infallibility. But it must define freedom, as it in truth is, as man’s real dependence on the God who has mediately addressed and dealt with us. It must define freedom as the faithfulness with which we can and should trace the divine testimonies. It must define it as a cleaving to canonical Scripture, to the fathers and to the confession, and therefore to ecclesiastical authority. It must define it as the unique proud independence which as real submission to real authority is attributed to every individual member of the Church, or rather is conferred by the Holy Spirit of the Word of God. It is only this way, that is, by a complete reversal of the front on which Catholicism would like to see us stand and where modern heresies would like to push us, that the strong and clear contrast between it and us can be made manifest, as is needful and also hopeful. Again, this must be done in the interests of the truth itself. But again, we must fail to recognize that Roman Catholicism can listen to us, that a renewal of conversation between us, and at least a common outlook upon the una sancta catholica [one holy catholic (Church)] can be achieved, only when it sees that in regard to the recognition and assertion of authority we are not inferior to it but rather superior, that with the proclamation of evangelical freedom we do not aim at a worse but at a better obedience.[1]

What if we were to reduce this whole paragraph to a couple base notions? One of them would be Barth’s hard commitment to a radical conception of total depravity; radical to the point that Barth thinks that the ‘fall’ has reduced the human capacity to know God to null. A second, and related notion, would bring us into the modern; what some have called a ‘turn-to-the-subject.’ Ultimately the bond that Barth sees tying Roman Catholic and NeoProtestant ecclesiology (among other things) together is a subjectivism that is grounded in a noetically dead human agent[s] who is incapable of arriving at accurate or genuine knowledge of God and His ways. Barth sees Catholicism, in this instance, as absolutizing or instutionalizing this subjectivist anthropology into the magisterial foundation of the Holy Roman See. As such, Barth, sees no place for the Freedom of God’s Word to actually have genuine freedom in Christ’s Church, precisely because that has been taken captive by the subjects and thus the Church it is supposed to have capacity to contradict and nurture. For Barth, the Catholic Church has collapsed the Word of God into itself, and as such has enslaved any semblance of God’s Word to its own subjectivity; thus, no genuine freedom is there to be found.

More positively, Barth believes that God’s Word has Freedom, and authority in the Church, when we simply submit ourselves to it as a predicate of the eternal Logos rather than making the Word a predicate of our own subjectivities. There is a genuine authority the Church has, but it is only when it understands that from within the freedom that comes by God’s Word as the foundation of all that the Church is. In this sense, then, the Church can only speak authoritatively insofar that it coheres with the freedom of the Christian that comes as the saints are in a participatory fellowship with the Christ. He is the authority of and for the Church, and only as the Church imbibes or bears witness to His authority is there a genuine freedom for the Church to obey; because there is someone to obey other than the Church.

[1] Barth, CD I/2§21, 215-16.