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The
CHRISTIAN
DOCTRINE
of GOD
DOGMATICS: Vol. I
Books by EMIL BRUNNER
Published by The Westminster Press
The Christian Doctrine of God
{Die christliche Lehre von Gott)
Man in Revolt (Der Mensch im Widerspruch)
The Mediator {Der Mittler)
The Divine Imperative {Das Gebot und die Ordnungen)
Revelation and Reason {Offenbarung und Vernunft)
The Divine-Human Encounter
( Wahrheit als Begegnung)
EMIL BRUNNER
The CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
of GOT)
* DOGMATICS: Vol. I
Translated by OLIVE WYON
Philadelphia THE WESTMINSTER PRESS
COPYRIGHT, MCML, BY W. L. JENKINS
All rights reserved — no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review in magazine or newspaper.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFACE
In the realm of doctrine the Christian Church has always recognized a twofold task: one concerning the Church itself; the other concerning the outside world, the world of doubt and unbelief. Although, at a time like the present, the conflict with unbelief and false ideologies may seem the more urgent one, yet the first task is always fundamental. For how can the Church do justice to her missionary calling in an un-Christian world if she is not herself clear about the content of her message? All down her history the Christian Church has given much thought to the basis, meaning and content of the message she has received — and is bound to proclaim; this process of reflection is what we mean by "dogmatics".
Dogmatics is not the Word of God. God can make His Word prevail in the world without theology. But at a time when human thought is so often confused and perverted by fantastic ideas and theories, spun out of men's own minds, it is evident that it is almost impossible to preserve the Divine Word with- out the most passionate intellectual effort to re-think its mean- ing and its content. The simple Christian may, it is true, under- stand and preserve God's Word without theology ; but for those Christians who are involved in the thinking of their own day, and who, as children of their own day, are deeply influenced by these currents of thought, an all-inclusive and thorough effort to re-think what has been "given" to faith is absolutely indis- pensable. This is particularly true for those whose calling it is to proclaim this faith to others.
Hence dogmatics serves first of all those who themselves exercise a teaching-office in the Church, as clergy and mis- sionaries, evangelists, pastors and catechists. In addition, it is useful to all those members of the Christian Church who desire to grapple with the religious problems which their faith creates in their own minds. Upon the ladder of reflection on that which is given with the Word of God, dogmatics, as the science of Christian doctrine, holds pride of place. Hence it is not "everybody's business", but only that of those who are capable of, and in need of, a thoroughgoing effort of thought.
There is no lack of dogmatic works in the Church. But the theological renaissance of the past twenty years has not pro- duced any comprehensive work which expresses the spirit of
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
this renewal. The monumental work of Karl Barth, which in spite of the five weighty volumes which have already appeared, has not yet covered one-third of the doctrinal material, makes us wonder — even when we take into account the great industry and creative powers of the great theologian of Basle — whether this massive work, in spite of (or on account of) its unusual length, will be able to do justice to all the claims of a compre- hensive presentation of Christian doctrine. In any case, there is room for other attempts.
One who for more than twenty years has been lecturing on dogmatics in the usual four terms a year, and so has tried nearly a dozen times to re-cast the doctrinal material as a whole, does not need to fear the charge of "superficiality", when he produces the result of this work of so many years as a whole, having dealt with it hitherto in single monographs — as Christ- ology, anthropology, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and of Revelation. Perhaps it is not too much to expect that the comprehensive presentation may succeed in overcoming and dispelling prejudices and misunderstandings which have arisen in the course of the last twenty years, and have led to contro- versy on points of detail; possibly this general method may achieve results which could not be reached by the method of "frontal attack".
Owing to my long co-operation with the (Ecumenical Move- ment, I am fully aware both of the needs and the hopes of the World Church. Hence I have been very careful to keep as closely as possible to the external form of dogmatics — to the theological tradition common to the Church as a whole. In the main, therefore, I have tried to follow the order of the Loci theologici which, from the days of Peter Lombard onwards, has formed the framework of Christian Dogmatics, and was also in all essentials adopted by that master of Reformed theology, Calvin. Over and over again I have proved that this procedure is fundamentally sound.
In order not to overburden the non-theological reader who is willing to make the effort to think through theological ques- tions, all the more technical historical material has been rele- gated to special appendices ; this has also had the advantage of enabling me to introduce surveys from the History of Dogma which will meet the needs of students, and may perhaps some- times even be useful to scholars. My thanks are due to Herr Pfarrer R. Rockenbach for the Index. It is my earnest desire that this work of dogmatics (of which the present volume is the
vi
I
PREFACE
first of three or four which have already been planned) may help to preserve the knowledge of the Divine Word, and to contribute to its expansion in a world which is fainting for lack of it, and is in such sore spiritual need.
EMIL BRUNNER
ZURICH,
Lent 1946
Vll
CONTENTS
PREFACE .
translator's note
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PROLEGOMENA
THE BASIS AND THE TASK OF DOGMATICS The Position of Dogmatics .... The Necessity for Dogmatics The Basis of Christian Doctrine : Revelation Revelation as the Word of God . Doctrine and the Witness of Faith The Norm of Christian Doctrine Dogma and Dogmatics ....
Dogmatics as a Science ....
The Contemporary Character of Dogmatics Faith and Thought in Dogmatics The Concept and the Task of Dogmatics .
APPENDIX TO PROLEGOMENA
3 6
14
22
35 43 50
60 67 73
78
(i) Theology and Dogmatics 89
(2) On the History of Dogmatics 91
(3) The Threefold Root of Dogmatics in the History of Theology 93
(4) Dogmatics and the Science of Religion 96
(5) Apologetics and "Eristics" 98
(6) Missionary Theology loi
(7) Dogma 103
(8) The Authority of Scripture 107
PART I
THE ETERNAL FOUNDATION OF THE DIVINE SELF-COMMUNICATION
Section One
THE NATURE OF GOD AND HIS ATTRIBUTES
Chapter 12. The Name of God 117
APPENDIX TO 12; (i) The Name of God in the Bible and in the History of Theology; (2) The "Natural" Knowledge of God; the Problem of the Theologia Naturalis 128
ix
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
PAGE
Chapter 13. God, the Lord 137
y/ APPENDIX TO 13; The Philosophical Idea of God in History . . 151
Chapter 14. The Holy 157
APPENDIX TO 14; (i) Transcendence of Essence and of Being, and the "analogia entis"; (2) The "Intolerance" of God; (iii) The Good
as Holy, and the Good as autonomous 175
Chapter 15. God is Love 183
APPENDIX TO 15; On the History of the Term AGAPE . . . 200
Chapter 16. The Triune God 205
APPENDIX TO 16; (i) On the Place of the Doctrine of the Trinity
and its History; (2) The Orthodox Doctrine of the Trinity . . 235
Chapter 17. The Problem of the "Divine Attributes" . . . 241
Chapter 18. God, the Almighty 248
Chapter 19. The Omnipresence and the Omniscience of God . 256
Chapter 20. The Eternity, Unchangingness, Faithfulness, and
Righteousness of God 266
Chapter 21. The Wisdom and the Glory of God .... 282
APPENDIX TO SECTION ONE: On the History of the Doctrine of the
Divine Attributes 293
(i) The Simplicity and Immutability of God .... 293
(2) The Idea of Omnipotence 294
(3) Omnipresence and Omniscience 297
(4) The Righteousness of God 300
Section Two THE WILL OF GOD
Chapter 22. The Eternal Divine Decrees and the Doctrine of
Election 303
Chapter 23. The Problem of "Double Predestination" . . 321
APPENDIX TO CHAPTERS 22 AND 2^ 34O
(i) On the History of the Doctrine of Predestination . . 340
(2) Karl Earth's Doctrine of Election 346
(3) On the Doctrine of Apokatastasis 352
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 355
INDEX OF NAMES . . 357
INDEX OF SCRIPTURE REFERENCES 359
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
The present work is an unabridged translation of Professor Brunner's first volume of his Dogmatics: Die christliche Lehre von Gott. It was published by the Zwingli-Verlag, Zurich, in 1946.
I have re-arranged the Table of Contents, and have added a Subject-Index, for the convenience of English-speaking readers. While I was preparing this translation Dr. Brunner kindly sent me a list of printer's errors discovered in the first German edition; at some points, therefore, I have been able to correct the German text.
For help on particular points I am indebted to the kindness of my friends: The Rev. C. H. Dodd, M.A., D.D.; the Rev. H. H. Farmer, M.A., D.D.; and the Rev. F. Hildebrandt, Ph.D.
Olive Wyon. Cambridge, 1949.
XI
PROLEGOMENA
THE BASIS AND THE TASK OF DOGMATICS
The
CHRISTIAN
DOCTRINE
of GOD
DOGMATICS: Vol. I
CHAPTER I
THE POSITION OF DOGMATICS
The intellectual enterprise which bears the traditional title of "dogmatics" I takes place within the Christian Church. It is this that distinguishes it from similar intellectual undertakings, especially within the sphere of philosophy, as that is usually understood. Our immediate concern is not to ask whether this particular undertaking is legitimate, useful, or necessary. The first thing we have to say about it is that it is closely con- nected with the existence of the Christian Church, and that it arises only within this sphere. We study dogmatics as members of the Church, with the consciousness that we have a com- mission from the Church, and a service to render to the Church, due to a compulsion which can only arise within the Church. [Historically and actually, the Church exists before dogmatics. The fact that the Christian Faith and the Christian Church exist, precedes the existence, the possibility, and the necessity for dogmatics. Thus if dogmatics is anything at all, it is a function of the Church.
It cannot, however, be taken for granted that there is, or should be, a science of dogmatics within the Christian Church; but if we reverse the question, from the standpoint of dog- matics it is obvious that we would never dream of asking whether there ought to be a Church, or a Christian Faith, or whether the Christian Faith and the Christian Church have any right to exist at all, or whether they are either true or neces- sary? Where this question does arise — and in days like ours it must be raised — it is not the duty of dogmatics to give the answer. This is a question for apologetics or "eristics". But dogmatics presupposes the Christian Faith and the Christian Church not only as a fact but as the possibility of its own existence^ From the standpoint of the Church, however, it is right to^put the question of the possibility of, and the necessity for, dogmatics.
But when all this has been said, the "place" of dogmatics has still only been defined in a very provisional sense. Further, this definition of its "place" is obliged to start from the fact that the Christian Church is a Teaching Church. But even as a Teaching Body the Church precedes dogmatics, both histori-
» See below, pp. 89 ff.
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
cally and actually. From its earliest days the Church, the Christian Community, has been pre-eminently a teaching body; one of her outstanding characteristics has been "teaching" or "doctrine".^ As the Lord of the Church, Jesus Christ was Him- self a Teacher, so also His disciples carry on a teaching ministry. We cannot think of the Christian Church without teaching, any more than we can think of a circle without a centre; teaching and "doctrine" belong to its very nature.
But this does not mean that teaching is the beginning and the end of the Church ; rather, teaching is one of its functions, and one of the basic elements of its life. Like the Lord of the Church Himself, His Apostles did not only teach: they did other things as well. "And they continued steadfastly in the Apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers. "2 This is the earliest description of the Primitive Church. Whether the "teaching" is put first intentionally^ or by accident, we will not as yet enquire; we may, however, guess that the order is not accidental. For there can be no doubt that from the very earliest days, and all down the centuries, teaching has been an outstanding function and expression of the life of the Church.
Dogmatics is related to this teaching function of the Church ; its living basis, its possibility, and — as will be shown later on — its content, all depend upon it; but this teaching of the Church is not "dogmatics". The Apostles are not systematic theo- logians, and what they teach is not dogmatics. It was two hundred years before the Christian Church produced the first "dogmatics" Thus it is not because there is a science of Chris- tian dogmatics that we have Christian teaching, but, con- versely, Christian teaching is the cause of dogmatics. Dogmatics — to put it so for the moment — is the Science of Christian teaching or doctrine. But the subject always exists before the "science" of the subject can be studied. The teaching Church, and tne teaching of the Church, is the "place" at which dog- matics arises. Dogmatics is a function of the teaching Church; speaking generally, it is a service which is rendered for the sake of the doctrine of the Church.
But the doctrine of the Church, and the teaching Church, do not merely constitute the presupposition of dogmatics in the sense that a subject presupposes the science of that subject. There may be, it is true, a science of Christian faith and of
» The German word Lehre = both "teaching" and "doctrine". (Tr.) ' Acts 2: 42.
THE POSITION OF DOGMATICS
Christian doctrine, for which that general relation between the subject and its science exists, which we might describe as a branch of general religious knowledge, namely, as the science of the Christian religion. It was thus conceived by Schleiermacher in his Short Exposition^ of the relation between the doctrine of the Church and dogmatics, although he did not adhere to this definition in his own work on the Christian Faith. When we said that the Church is the "place" of dogmatics, we meant that this kind of academic or intellectual knowledge or research was only possible within the community of believers. Dogmatics are only possible or thinkable, not only because the Church and Christian teaching exist, but also only where they exist. Dog- matics is itself a function of the Church. Only one who is a genuine "believer" and, as such, believes in the Church and its teaching, can render to the Church the service which is implied in the idea of dogmatics. The presupposition of dogmatics is not only the existence of the Church and its doctrine, but life within the Church, and in its doctrine. Dogmatic thinking is not only thinking about the Faith, it is believing thinking. There may be various ways of solving the problem of the Theory of Knowledge which this raises i^ this, in any case, is the claim which dogmatics makes, without which its effort ceases to be dogmatics, and it becomes the neutral science of religion. It is the believing Church itself which, in dogmatics, makes its own teaching the object of reflection; essentially, dogmatics claims to be an academic study controlled by the Church.
' Schleiermacher's Werke, I, i, para. 97: "The connected presentation of doc- trine, as it is accepted ... at a given time, is what we mean by the expression 'dogmatics' or 'dogmatic theology'."
2 Cf. E. Burnier: "La restauration de la theologie biblique et sa signification epistemologique" , in Bible et theologie, Lausanne, 1943.
CHAPTER 2
THE NECESSITY FOR DOGMATICS
The urgent question for a humanity which despairs of all truth: "Is there any Truth which one can beheve at all? And, if so, does Christian doctrine, as such, claim to be truth of this kind?" lies, as we have already seen, outside the sphere of dogmatics. The Christian Church deals with this question by means of an intellectual discipline which is closely related to dogmatics, yet which must always be strictly distinguished from it; this study is called "Apologetics", a name which is as traditional as the term "Dogmatics". Apologetics is the dis- cussion of questions raised by people outside of, and addressed to, the Christian Church; therefore at all times it has proved to be as urgent, and as inevitable, as the Christian study of doctrine proper, or dogmatics.
The question of the justification for, and the necessity of, dogmatics, differs from the former question because it arises within the Church. And yet it is a genuine and not a rhetorical question; nor is it even merely academic. The fact is, this question is justified from the standpoint of the "scientific" theologian. Serious objections have been raised to the whole undertaking, objections which must be recognized; to ignore them would simply mean that we had already fallen a prey to that dogmatic "rigidity", and that over-emphasis on the intel- lectual aspect of doctrine which is so deplorable.
The first objection concerns the loss of directness, and even of simplicity of faith, which is necessarily connected with the process of dogmatic reflection. A person who has hitherto only encountered the Biblical Gospel in its simplest form, and has been gripped by it in a direct, personal way, must necessarily feel appalled, chilled, or repelled by the sight of massive volumes of dogmatics, and his first acquaintance with the whole appa- ratus of ideas and of reflection connected with this study of theology as a science. Instinctively the simple Christian mur- murs: "But why this immense apparatus of learning? What is the use of these subtle distinctions and these arid intellectual definitions? What is the use of this process of 'vivisection' of our living faith?" When, further, this "simple believer" be- comes aware of the theological controversies and passionate dogmatic conflicts which seem inevitable, it is easy to under-
6
THE NECESSITY FOR DOGMATICS
stand that the simple Christian man or woman turns away from all this with horror, exclaiming: "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou didst hide these things from the wise and understanding, and didst reveal them unto babes!"! jje sees the contradiction between the simple Gospel of the New Testament and this world of extremely abstract conceptions, between the living concreteness of the speech of Jesus and His Apostles, which speaks straight to the hearts of all who listen aright, and this ruthless analysis, this massive labour of systematic theology, in which only people of high intellectual gifts can share, which seems to be possible only at the cost of losing the freshness and directness of a living ex- perience. Like a certain French theologian, he says, rightly: "A Gospel which cannot be put on a postcard cannot be the Gospel which was preached to the fishermen of the Lake of Galilee!" From this point of view dogmatics seems to be a perversion of the Gospel.
The second objection is closely connected with the first. It is raised by people who feel that the Biblical Gospel calls them to action. Their faith has awakened them to see and feel the sufferings of humanity, the terrible need and the burning questions of their own day, and they feel that "love constrains them" to give the world all the help they possibly can, both inwardly and outwardly. This being so, they feel: "Who would waste time trying to answer such difficult intellectual prob- lems? Dogmatics is theory, but faith is obedience and fellow- ship. How can we waste time in speculations about the mys- teries of the Trinity while there are human beings in trouble — both of body and soul!"
This direct and non-reflective rejection of dogmatics by the practical Christian layman is austerely expressed^ by the philosopher in intellectual terms. Dogmatics, he says, like all theory, belongs to the "sphere of recollection", of reflection, of thought which is concerned with ideas; faith arises in the "reality" of encounter. Between these two there is an im- passable gulf. The truth which is given to faith is only under- stood by one who meets the "Other" in action and in suffering, but it is not understood by the man who seeks truth in the sphere of solitary thought. Therefore the introduction of the truth of faith into that intellectual process of reflection, which
' Matt. II : 25.
' Cf. E. Grisebach: Gegenwart; Freiheit und Zucht; Die Schicksalsfrage des Abendlandes .
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
is SO remote from reality, can do faith no good, indeed, it can only do harm, because it diverts the Christian believer from his real duty of active love to God and his neighbour.
There is another equally important objection. It runs rather like this: "Dogmatics comes from 'dogma'. However you may define it, still by your precious 'dogma' you want to force us to accept an objective authority, an impersonal doctrinal author- ity, inserted between us and the Source of faith, Jesus Christ Himself; you want to set up a system of doctrinal coercion, which is in opposition to the freedom of faith. You want to establish an ecclesiastical heteronomy which restricts the liberty of the children of God ! You want to repeat the ancient error, and to perpetuate it, that doctrine is the object of faith — a doctrine preserved by the Church, on which she bases her clerical authority. Inevitably, dogmatics leads to ecclesiastical tyranny, which, more than anything else, obstructs our view of the Gospel of the New Testament."
Finally, there is a fourth objection, which represents the views of those who admit the necessity for thinking about the Gospel, but who regard dogmatics as a perverted form of such thinking. Those who take this position claim that what the Church of our day needs is not a continuance of the dogmatic labours of previous centuries, which, as we know by experience, divides the Church by its definitions, but an intellectual effort which, recognizing the peculiar need of our own times, and the widespread lack of faith at the present day, tries to seek to win the outsider by answering his questions, and by entering into a real discussion with him. A dogmatic analysis of ideas does not make the Gospel more intelligible to the unbeliever, but less; it does not help him to understand why he ought to accept the Christian Faith. The true task of the Christian thinker, however, should be the very opposite — a task which hitherto has only been undertaken by great men who are exceptions in the realm of theology, men like Hamann, Pascal, or Kierkegaard. So long as the Church still uses her intellectual powers on the old traditional lines, she is neglect- ing the one and only important and fruitful intellectual task, which is her real duty.
Faced by these objections, are we to regard the enterprise of dogmatics, in spite of the weighty tradition behind it, as unnecessary? Or even if not actually dangerous, as at least a bypath for the teaching Church?
In the following pages the effort will be made to allow the
THE NECESSITY FOR DOGMATICS
History of the Church itself to give the answer to this ques- tion. We must, however, begin at this point: namely, that the Bible itself knows nothing of that process which from time immemorial the Church has known as "dogmatics". For more than a thousand years Israel existed as a religious community without anything like a system of dogma, in the sense, for instance, in which Calvin uses it in his Institutes — indeed, the Jewish Church did not even possess a Catechism, and even the Early Christian Church — that is, the Christian Church at the time of its highest vitality and purity, did not produce any- thing of the kind. This fact does make us think. One thing it does prove, beyond a doubt, namely, that dogmatics does not belong to the "esse" , but at the most to the "bene esse" of the Church. For the "esse" of the Church consists only in that without which she could not possibly exist. But the Church existed for two hundred years without dogmatics. Thus if dogmatics is under no circumstances an absolute necessity, is it perhaps a relative necessity? That is, something which, under certain circumstances, is necessary. The History of the Church^ gives a clear affirmative answer to this question — a threefold answer. Dogmatics springs from a threefold source: there are three urgent necessities for dogmatics which spring from the life of the Church itself, and cannot be ignored, {a) The first root of dogmatics is the struggle against false doctrine. The sinful self-will of man takes the Gospel — at first imperceptibly, and indeed perhaps unconsciously — and alters the content and the meaning of the message of Jesus Christ and His Mighty Act of Redemption, of the Kingdom of God and the destiny of Man. This process produces "substitute" Gospels, introduces "foreign bodies" into Christian truth, and distorts the Christian message: the very words of the Bible are twisted, and given an alien meaning, and indeed, one which is directly opposed to its purpose. The Christian Church is in danger of exchanging its divine treasury of truth for mere human inventions. This being so, ought not those who know the original Truth feel called to make a clear distinction between truth and illusion — between "gold" and "cat-gold" (Yellow mica)? This necessity of distinguishing between truth and error, and of warning the members of the Church against false teaching, makes it quite impossible to adopt the naive attitude which can ignore these things. Comparison and reflection become necessary, and the more subtle and refined are the errors, the more urgent does
' Cf. below, pp. 93 ff.
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
this become. Where the very words of the Bible have been twisted to mean something different, it is not sufficient to appeal to the "words" of Scripture; where whole systems of alien thought have been "smuggled" into the message of the Church, it becomes necessary to set the whole on the one side over against the whole on the other, and to show clearly how each is built up into a system. It is the perversion of doctrine which leads to the formation of the ideas and systems of dogma. It was out of the fight against heresy that the dog- matics of the Early Church arose ; the dogmatics of the Refor- mation period arose out of the struggles to purify the message of the Bible from Roman Catholic errors.
(6) The second source from which dogmatics is derived is that of catechetical instruction, or preparation for Baptism. Even the simplest Christian faith contains a doctrinal element. We have already pointed out that the Church never can, and never will be, without doctrine. Even the simple, non-theo- logical teaching of Jesus is full of "theological" content. A person cannot become a Christian without knowing something about the Father in Heaven, the forgiveness of sins, Atonement through the Son of God, and the Work of the Holy Spirit; and when he "knows" these Biblical phrases he must go further and grasp their inner meaning. The teaching Church has to become the Church which instructs catechumens. But the thoughtful person cannot receive these doctrines without finding that they raise questions in his mind. The more alert and vigorous is his thinking, the more urgent and penetrating do his questions become. The Christian message must mould and penetrate not only the heart of man, but also his mind, and his processes of thought. But this can only take place if the Christian Message is thought out afresh and re-formulated in intellectual terms. The thoughtful believer is constantly perceiving new depths and heights in the truth of the Gospel. Thus the Christian catechetical instruction which was given through the rich intellectual medium of the Greek world of culture became a method of theological and dogmatic teaching. The instruction of educated catechumens developed into Dogmatics.
The third root of dogmatics is that of Biblical exegesis. Where there is a living Church, a living spiritual life, there men feel the need to penetrate more deeply into the meaning of the Bible, to draw water from the richness of its wells of truth, to enquire into the hidden connections between its main ideas. Such people are not satisfied with an approximate and pro-
10
THE NECESSITY FOR DOGMATICS
visional knowledge — they want something exact and per- manent. But this means that when the great "words" of the Bible, such as "Sin" or "Grace", are studied, it is not enough to study them in the particular passage in question : they must be investigated from the standpoint of Biblical doctrine as a whole, and this, they feel, they must grasp as a whole. It is not sufficient, for instance, to know what the Apostle Paul means by the "righteousness of God" in a particular passage in the Epistle to the Romans: we want to know what he means by this expression as a whole, and also how this specifically Pauline phrase is related to other phrases which, although they sound different, contain a similar meaning in other Biblical writers. Then when the Biblical scholar has done his work — when he has explained the Epistle to the Romans, and has related it to "Pauline theology" as a whole — then the reader of the Bible, who wants to learn not only from Paul but from the whole revelation contained in Scripture, starts a fresh process of questioning, and it is such questions that the systematic theologian tries to answer. It is at this point that the "Dic- tionary of the Bible", or the "loci iheologici", comes into being.
This threefold root is still visible in the titles of the three standard dogmatic works of the Reformation period. The struggle against heresy is represented by Zwingli's Commen- iarius de vera et falsa religione ; the instruction of catechumens by the Institutio christianae religionis of Calvin — which de- veloped out of an expanded Catechism; the need for a "Dic- tionary of the Bible" for the Bible reader, by the first dogmatic work of Melanchthon, his Loci theologici.
For the sake of the Gospel the Church cannot ignore its duty to distinguish false doctrine from true; to this end it must make the effort to express the content of its simple teaching in more exact and thoughtful terms. The Church must help the reader of the Bible by giving him a comprehensive explanation of the chief Biblical terms; Church leaders cannot ignore the fact that it is their duty to give thoughtful members of the Christian community a body of instruction which goes further than the most elementary elements of the Faith, and to answer their questions. Hence the Church cannot fail to develop her doctrine in the sense of giving more exact and precise definitions of ideas ; then, she must show the connexion of these ideas with the whole body of Christian truth. This process is "Dogmatics". This is the answer from Church History.
But this historical answer alone is not sufficient; primarily,
II
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
because it starts uncritically from an historical position which is not impregnable ; that is, it assumes that the original doctrine of the Church was clear and uniform.
The New Testament is not a book of doctrine, but it is a collection of apostolic confessions of faith and historical records which have been written down in order to awaken and streng- then faith. But in these believing testimonies to God's revela- tion in Jesus Christ there is already a good deal of intellectual and theological reflection — in some more, and in others less. From this it is possible to construct a "theology of the Apostles" — as we shall see later on — and this New Testament doctrine will become the basis of all dogmatic instruction. Now, how- ever, this process of development — from the relatively non- reflective, immediate character of the doctrine of the New Testament, to the highly developed doctrinal system of the Church, proves to be inevitable, because this "theology of the Apostles" is not an absolute unity, but is presented in a series of different types of doctrine, which differ considerably from one another. In a variety of doctrine the one Christ aLnd the one Gospel bear witness to the Divine Act of Redemption. The fact that this "unity" exists within a partly contradictory multiplicity, evokes critical reflection. It is not the task of the Church to teach what Matthew, Paul, or John teach, but it is her duty to proclaim the Word of God; therefore she must teach the one divine truth in these differing Apostolic doctrines. If there were an absolutely uniform, and therefore unmis- takably "apostolic doctrine", or "doctrine of the New Testa- ment", then perhaps the work of dogmatics might be super- fluous. But since this is not the case, and since the truth of revelation must be sought in and behind the unity of the different testimonies to Christian truth, the work of reflection upon dogma is indispensable.
Hence a simple reproduction of "the" doctrine of the Bible is impossible. Every theology or proclamation of the Church which claims to be able to do this is based upon a fiction; in actual fact it is accomplished by an unconscious, and unac- knowledged process of systematization of theology. The teachers or preachers of the Church who claim for themselves and others that "they have no deahngs with theology, but that they stick quite simply to the teaching of the Bible", deceive themselves and others. Whatever the Church teaches, she teaches on the basis of a normative decision — even though this decision may have taken place unconsciously — concerning the nature of
12
THE NECESSITY FOR DOGMATICS
"sound doctrine". Open and honest consideration of "sound doctrine" can never end in appealing to any "standard" doctrine. "Sound doctrine", when more closely examined, always proves to be a task which is never ended, and it is never something which exists "ready-made". Even behind the most primitive forms of Christian teaching, behind the teaching of Jesus and of the Apostles, "sound doctrine" is always some- thing which has to be sought. If the New Testament witness to revelation is the basis and the content of all dogmatics (as will be shown in the following pages to be the case), then its necessity has already been proved by the fact that the task of discovering the unity of sound doctrine behind the different doctrines of the New Testament is unavoidable. Thus the truth of revelation and human doctrine do not only diverge in the sphere of dogmatic reflection, but this contradiction exists already, even in the simplest Biblical witness to revelation and faith. Here already it is evident that the divine Truth is a light which cannot tie received by the human mind without being refracted. The one truth of Christ is refracted in the manifold doctrines of the Apostles; but it is the task of the Church — which has to proclaim the truth of Christ, and thus also has to teach — to seek continually for the one Light of Truth within these refractions. Dogmatics is the science which enables the Church to accomplish this task.
13
CHAPTER 3
THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE: REVELATION^
The doctrine of the Christian Church, which dogmatics exists to serve, hke all doctrine, points beyond itself to a concrete reality; it is doctrine about "Something"; that is, it is the doctrine which concerns God and His Kingdom, His Nature and His Will, and His relation to man and to the world. Chris- tian doctrine, however, is fundamentally different from all other kinds of doctrine. For the Reality with which Christian doctrine deals — God — ^by its very nature, is far above all human doctrinal conceptions. This "Something" with which Christian doctrine is concerned cannot be "taught" by man, for "It" transcends all human doctrines; indeed, all human doctrines are excluded precisely because this Reality is not a "Something", not even a "concrete reality", since God is Absolute Subject. By his own knowledge, all that man can grasp is the world.
iGod, however, is not the world; therefore He stands outside the circle in which human knowledge and human doctrine — acquired by man's own effgrts — can move, and with which they are competent to deaTJ Knowledge of God exists only in so far as there is a self -disclosure, a self-manifestation of God, that is, in so far as there is "revelation^There is a doctrine of God, in the legitimate sense of the words, only in so far as God Himself imparts it.* The human doctrine of God — which is undoubtedly the doctrine of the Church— y^s thus only legiti- mate, and can only claim to be "truth", in so far as the divine revelation — that which God teaches about Himself — is validly expressed by it] Thus Christian doctrine not only points away from itself to its actual "subject", but it points away from itself to the divine "doctrine", i.e. to that which God Himself mani- fests and "teaches" about Himself. It is evident that in so doing not only the origin and content of this divine "teaching" (or doctrine), but also the manner of "teaching", of the mani- festation or self-communication, must be of a special kind. The
' This chapter is a condensed summary of the content of my book, Offen- barung und Vernunft, 1941; its First Part contains a doctrine of Revelation, which is here presupposed.
' There is a play on words in this paragraph, which is impossible to repro- duce in English. Lehre = "doctrine" or "teaching"; Lehren = "To teach", (Tr.)
14
THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
concept, the "Word of God", does not solve the problem of the nature of this divine teaching; for when God "speaks", if it is really He who speaks, something is said which is evidently quite different from that which men usually call "speaking".^
Thus all Christian doctrine, even in its primitive form in the New Testament, in this twofold sense, is merely a pointer to something outside itself; it is the pointer to "Him, Himself", and it is a pointer to that which He discloses concerning Him- self, which human speech or teaching "reproduces", or repeats, or expresses in human language. The Biblical expression for this twofold character of Christian doctrine as a "pointer" is called: "Witness". The Apostles, the first teachers of the Christian community, know themselves to be witnesses to the divine revelation. The divine revelation is not only the basis and content of their teaching, but it is its authorization; their teaching claims to be true and valid because, and in so far as, the divine teaching itself is accomplished in their teaching. But what is this divine revelation which constitutes the basis, the content, and the authority of their teaching? Since the dis- cussion of this question constitutes the content of another of my books we must here confine ourselves to a brief account of the content of that book.
(i) In the New Testament the idea of revelation does not denote a single entity, but a complex one; there are many "forms of revelation" ;2 it is only as these are welded into a unity that they constitute that which lies at the basis of Christian doctrine, and determine its claim to truth and validity.
In the centre of this New Testament testimony stands the historical event: Jesus Christ. 3
The fact that "the Word became flesh" is the centre of the divine manifestation, towards which all the teaching and witness of the original witnesses is directed. Obviously, this means that the "Word of God" is not that which we human beings mean by a "word": He Himself, Jesus Christ, is the "Word" of God; it is therefore impossible to equate any human words, any "speech-about-Him" with the divine self-communi- cation. Jesus Christ Himself is more than all words about Him; the "W^ord" of God, the decisive self-communication of God, is a Person, a human being, the man in whom God Him- self meets us. The fact that He is "here", that He has "come",
' Cf. Offenharung und Vernunft, pp. 24-33.
* Karl Barth also speaks of the "Three Forms of the Word of God", Kirchl. Dogm. I, I, p. 125. 3 Offenharung und Vernunft, pp. 95-117.
15
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
that we may see and know Him in His action and His suffering, in His speech and in His Being, as Him in whom God's HoHness and Mercy stand before us in person, inviting us to Himself, and giving Himself to us — this is the revelation, the self- manifestation of God. In Him, through Him, God makes Him- self known to us. But this unique historical event cannot be understood as an isolated Fact; it can only be grasped in the light of a twofold "before", and a fourfold "afterwards".
(2) The witness borne to Jesus Christ attests Him as the One in whom the promises of the Old Covenant are fulfilled, as the Messiah whom the Prophets foretold. ^ Jesus Christ wills to be understood, and indeed must be understood, in connexion with the preceding and provisional revelation of the Old Covenant just as, on the other hand, this Old Testament revelation itself can only be rightly understood as the precursor of the revela- tion in Jesus Christ. It is precisely this duality, the fact that the revelation of the Old Testament in its wholeness "intends" Jesus Christ, and yet that it witnesses to this only in a pre- paratory and provisional manner, which is the decisive fact. If anyone identifies the revelation of the Old Covenant with that of the New, he misses the meaning of the New Testament witness, as that which distinguishes the two forms of revela- tion from one another.
The revelation of the Old Testament, for its part, contains a variety of forms of revelation; but the decisive and standard one is that of the prophetic Word. God reveals Himself here through the Word, through speech. This constitutes both the greatness and the limitation of this revelation — its greatness, in the fact that because the Word, the speech, stands in a distinc- tive relation to the mystery of personality and its self-manifes- tation; its limitation, because no speech, no word, is adequate to the mystery of God as Person. The provisional nature of this revelation comes out precisely in the fact that God only "speaks" in it, but does not yet reveal Himself in Personal Presence.
It is precisely this twofold nature of the relation to the Fact of Christ that is meant by the expression in the Gospel of John — a phrase which is both an antithesis and a synthesis — "The Word became flesh . . . and we beheld His Glory ".2 That of which the Prophets could only "speak", is now actually here in person; in itself "speech" is only a provisional and preparatory revelation.
(3) The revelation in Jesus Christ and the revelation in the
« Offenbarung und Vernunft, pp. 82-97. * John i: 14.
16
THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
prophetic Word are both historical ; that which took place and was proclaimed within Israel was a "New Thing" ; so again was that which took place in Jesus Christ; it was something com- pletely new. But now, according to the witness of the New, as well as of the Old Testament, this historical revelation pre- supposes a pre-historical revelation. ^ The revelation in history is retrospective in character. It is not addressed to an emptiness in man but to a false "fullness". It does not point to an ignorant and therefore innocent being, but to a guilty creature, who is therefore aware that all is not right with him: in a word, it is addressed to sinful man.
But sin, as the broken relationship between man and God, presupposes a relation with God which preceded the breach, and a knowledge of God which was given with this relation to God, that is, an original revelation. Whenever we use the word "sinner" we imply the Original Revelation; to deny the original revelation means to deny the fact of sin. Thus the Old Testa- ment begins its account of the Prophetic revelation of the Covenant in Israel with an " C/r-geschichte" or primal history, which precedes that of Israel, and the revelation of the Cove- nant. God has revealed Himself not only to the Hebrew, but to Man as a whole, to "Adam". The witness of the Primal Revela- tion is inseparable from the witness of revelation of the Old Testament; for the Primal revelation precedes history as a whole, and the history of Israel in particular.
In the New Testament, moreover, it becomes plain why it is impossible to keep silence about this revelation which precedes all history, and why it must be taught. It alone makes man a responsible being — or, to put it more exactly: through it alone is man responsible for his sin. ^ithout some knowledge of the will of God there is no sin; for sin means turning away from God. But how could we turn away from God unless we had previously been in His presence! How could we despise His will if we knew nothing of His wiUTlTo understand man as sinner, therefore, means to understand him from the stand- point of his original relation to God, and of the original revela- tion which this presupposes. It is the dialectic of sin, and of responsibility for sin and in sin, which means both a know- ledge of God and an ignorance of Him. If we knew nothing how could we sin ! And yet sin consists precisely in the fact that this knowledge has been lost, that the knowledge of the True God has degenerated into superstition and idolatry.
' Offenbarung und Vernunfi, pp. 59-81. 17
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
Apart from revelation there would be no insane idolatry, and no sin.'' But the fact that the revelation of God is turned into the insanity of idolatry, constitutes sin. This is the teaching of the Bible, and all down the ages this is what the Church has taught. Without this revelation which precedes history, the historical revelation is not intelligible. And yet the real nature of this "pre-historical" revelation can only be understood from the standpoint of this historical revelation; for sinful man no longer understands it, although the fact that he is a sinner is certainly based upon this fact.
(4) The revelation in the historical Fact of Jesus Christ does not only contain this twofold presupposition; it is also neces- sarily connected with a manifold form of revelation which comes after it. As an historical revelation to us who are not contemporaries of Jesus, but who are separated from Him by the history of more than nineteen hundred years, it is only accessible to us through the testimony of the first teachers and witnesses. The revelation of Christ comes to us in the words of the Apostles,' in the New Testament. Their witness — in accor- dance with the fact that in Jesus the Word became flesh — contains two elements: the record which bears witness, and the teaching which confirms it.
To us, who have not seen Him in the flesh, and as the Risen Lord, He does not come in the same form as He came to those who saw Him when He met them as their Risen, Living Lord. And yet He comes to us as the Same, and He is truly present to us. To us also He reveals Himself ; but He reveals Himself to us through the revelation of the apostolic testimony in their narrative and their teaching concerning Him, the Christ. When the eye-witnesses were no longer in this earthly life, the Church was so conscious of the revelatory power of the Apostles' Word that she called it the "Word of God", pure and simple.
This phrase, however, may give rise to a serious misunder- standing— a misunderstanding which throws the Christian Church back to the level of the revelation of the Old Testa- ment, namely, that God's revelation is identical with a human "word" about God, whereas the revelation of Christ fulfils the Old Testament revelation, and leaves it behind, in the very fact that "the Word became Flesh". This designation of the New Testament as the "Word of God" is correct, however, in so far as it recognizes and emphasizes in it a standard form of
' Cf. Luther, W. A., p. 14, p. 588. Nisi diviniiatis notitiam habuissent, non potuissent earn tribuere idolis. * Offenbarung und Vernunft, pp. 117-34.
THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
revelation which cannot be severed from the Christian revela- tion.
(5) The New Testament testimony to Jesus the Christ does not, however, reach us apart from the mediation of the teaching Church. I Only those who take an unthinking Fundamentalist view can fall into the error of imagining that we are here directly confronted by the witness of the Apostles — is it not indeed only through the medium of the Church that we possess the New Testament, the writings of the Apostles, who collected them, preserved them, copied them again and again, had them printed, translated, and proclaimed to us? The community of believers itself, however, does not live first of all on the Bible — the Christian religion is not the religion of a Book — but on the living word of our contemporaries M^ho can testify to us them- selves that Christ is the Living and Present Lord, Praedicatio verbi divini est verhum divinum — this daring phrase of Bul- linger's is not exaggerated if it is applied to the meaning of the Church's message, to that which ought to happen, which, by the grace of God, continually does happen. Thus the message of the Church — which is in living union with Christ — is also a form of revelation. The teaching of the Church about revela- tion is itself the bearer of the revelation.
(6) In all these forms revelation is understood as something objective, as something which confronts us, something outside ourselves. But this is a very improper and inexact way of speaking; for revelation is certainly not a "Something", a "thing"; but it is a process, an event, and indeed an event which happens to us and in us. Neither the prophetic Word of the Old Testament, nor Jesus Christ, nor the witness of the Apostles, nor of the preachers of the Church who proclaim Him, "is" the revelation; the reality of the revelation cul- minates in the "subject" who receives it. Indeed, it is quite possible that none of these forms of revelation may become revelation to us. If there is no faith, then the revelation has not been consummated: it has not actually happened, so to speak, but it is only at the first stage. All objective forms of revelation need the "subject" in whom they become revelation. The Bible itself calls this inward process "revelation".^ It was a new particular intervention of God which opened the eyes of Peter to the Mystery of the Messiah, so that he could then confess Him as the Son of the Living God. 3 Again, it was the same
' Offenharung und Vernunft, pp. 134-61.
» Ibid., pp. 161-80. 3 Matt. 16: 16.
19
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
intervention of God which happened to Paul when "it pleased God to reveal His Son" in him." And the same process of revelation takes place wherever Christ manifests Himself to a human being as the living Lord and is received in faith. Our spiritual forefathers used to call this the "tesiimonium spiritus sancti" ; but we ourselves, in accordance with the Scriptures, will not deny the title of "revelation" to this "testimonium spiritus internum".
(7) We have not yet said, however, all that must be said if the word "revelation" is to have its full weight. As the Prophet of the Old Testament knew that the "Word" which he pro- claimed was not yet the final revelation, and therefore looked forward into the future, where the fulfilment still had to take place, so we also look beyond the "Word made flesh" to a future form of revelation, when we shall no longer merely "believe", but we shall "see", face to face;' indeed, this future revelation, which is taken for granted in the New Testament, is frequently described with great emphasis by the word "revelation" aTTOKaXviftLs.
This word aTTOKaXvifsLs is a synonym for the Parousia, for the perfected revelation at the end of the ages. 3 How, indeed, could it be otherwise! The very fact of the Incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ proclaims that revelation means the fullness of the Presence of God with us, and therefore, that we are with Him. Revelation is, it is true, never the mere com- munication of knowledge, but it is a life-giving and a life- renewing communion. But so long as we are "in the body of this death", this revelation is always incomplete; thus the meaning of revelation is only fully achieved where all that separates has been removed, and where the fullness of the Presence has been realized. From this final form of revelation alone do we fully understand the meaning of each form of revelation.
Above all, from this standpoint we also understand that in all the various forms of revelation4 there is one meaning: Em- manuel, God with us. It is the same Son of God who in Jesus Christ became man, whom the Prophets discerned dimly from afar; He is the same in whose image man has been created, and in whom lies both the meaning and the foundation of the Creation of the world. It is He who constitutes the secret or
I Gal. i: 15. * I Cor. 13: 12.
3 Cf. Romans 2:5:1 Cor. i: 7; 2 Thess. i: 7.
4 Offenbarung und Vernunft, pp. 181-89.
20
THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
manifest centre of all the testimony of Scripture ; He it is whom the Word of the Church has to proclaim and to teach, whom the Holy Spirit attests in the heart of the believer, and through whom the "new man" is created. It is also for that complete revelation at the end of the age that the Church waits, in whom the "faithful" will see God "face to face".
We need to see both this unity and this multiplicity of the forms of revelation in their variety and their distinctive char- acter. In their unity they are "the revelation"; none of these links in the chain can be dispensed with, none may be neglected or ignored at the expense of another. It is important to know two things: first, that from the very beginning God has revealed Himself in His Creation, but that we can only know what this means through His revelation in Jesus Christ; and to know that we men, from the very beginning, have been created in and for this Image of God, and that no sin of ours can destroy this original destiny of human nature. Secondly, it is equally important to realize that it is only in Jesus Christ that we know our original destiny, and that it is only through Him that this "Image" is realized in us: in our present state, imper- fectly, but in the age to come, in its full perfection.
21
CHAPTER 4
REVELATION AS THE WORD OF GOD
The presupposition of all valid speech or teaching of the Church about God is the self-revelation of God. The previous chapter — which gathers up in brief compass the results of a former detailed study — has dealt with this subject. But there is still a final step to be taken: the question still remains: How can human doctrine spring from divine revelation? We have seen, it is true, how rich and varied is the drama of historical events to which the Christian Church points when she speaks of "revelation". But this does not establish a relation between it and valid speech about God. The decisive middle term is still absent, that is, the fact that God Himself speaks — the Word of God. I
The task would be much easier if we could confine our investi- gations to the Old Testament. For there the standard form of revelation is the fact that "God speaks". It is true that even then the relation could not be established as simply as in orthodox theology, whether Catholic or Protestant, where the human doctrine of God is based upon the assumption that revelation is a divine doctrine, a doctrine revealed, that is, by God Himself; thus where the revelation itself already bears the stamp of a formulated doctrine, and even of the fixed word of Scripture. In the Old Testament, it is true, there can be no question of such a point of view. Revelation is not only that Word of God which is communicated through the "word" of the prophets, but it is at the same time an action of God in History, an Act of God, which cannot be ranged under the heading of the "Word" or the "Speech" of God.^ Yet it is possible to say this: In the prophetic revelation the revelation of the Old Covenant attains its highest point ; the prophetic teaching is the standard and characteristic form of this revelation. From this standpoint it would be easy to find a point of transition to the teaching task of the Church; does not the form of the revelation itself already contain the decisive pre-condition for valid human teaching, namely: that God Himself actually speaks, using human words, in formulated sentences, which, like other sentences, are formed of intelligible words ? Thus here the Word
• Cf. the excellent article on the word Aoyot; in the Theol. Worterbuch z. N.T. - Cf. Grether, Nawe iind Wort Gottes im A.T., pp. 127 ff.
22
REVELATION AS THE WORD OF GOD
of God is present in the form of revealed human words, not behind them — which human words merely seek to express, just as a poet tries to express in words what an impression of Nature or of a musical work of art "says" to him — but in direct identity, in the complete equation of the human word with the "Word of God". There is no reason to doubt that the Prophet, who was conscious that God had "put His words into his mouth", combined this idea with the conception of the "Word of God", and regarded himself as a wholly passive instrument of the Divine revelation. ^
Between us and the Old Testament, however, there stands a new form of revelation, the fulfilment of all that was only promised in the Old Testament, and the actual content of the divine revelation proclaimed by the Apostles and the Church: Jesus Christ Himself. Thus this "revelation" is not a "Word" but a Person — a human life fully visible within history, a human destiny so like, and so unlike, every other: Jesus of Nazareth the Rabbi, the wonder-worker, the Friend of publicans and sinners, and the Crucified and Risen Lord, now exalted to the Right Hand of God. Whatever He may be — so much is plain : He is not a "Word"; He is not "speech", or a summary of sentences like the prophetic utterances; and it is this very fact which is joyfully proclaimed: that for this very reason, just because He is quite different from a speech, namely, God Him- self present, acting in His own Person, that He is the con- summation of the revelation of God. For what the prophets could "only" say, towards which their word could "only" point, as something which was yet to come, a Perfection yet to be realized in the future, has now happened: Emmanuel, God with us. God Himself, not only a Word about Him, is now here. It is this that characterizes the New Age as contrasted with the past as a whole, even as contrasted with the revelation in the Old Covenant: the fact that He Himself is now here; He Himself is speaking, but for that very reason He is not merely the One who speaks, He is also the One who acts. That is why the Kingdom of God has now dawned; hence now the old is over and past, even the Old Covenant with all the forms of revelation proper to it. These are all severed from the new revelation, towards which they all pointed as heralds, as a light which shone out into the future, pointing towards the Coming One, Jesus Christ, in whom God Himself is present, speaking and acting.
' Cf. Eichrodt, Theol. des A.T., II, pp. 21 fif. 23
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
This profound change is the content of the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel, This new revelation, which is the subject of the whole New Testament message, is presented in the Johannine Prologue as a theme expressed as the transition from the Word to the Person: "The Word became flesh." This means: He who could only be foretold previously in human language through the speech of the Prophets, is now present "in His own Person". What here takes place is not an hypostatization of the Word ; on the contrary, the hypostatization of the Word, like that which took place in the work of Philo, the Jewish-Hellenistic thinker and writer, or the hypostatization of the Torah, of the Word of the Law or of the Scriptures, as became the custom in Rabbinic Judaism,'' has now become impossible; it has been eliminated. That which was previously "Word" has now revealed itself in such a way that henceforth it has become evident that the "Word-about-Him" is different from Him, Himself, and that the real revelation is the fact that He Himself is here present. The message of the Johannine Prologue, therefore, is this: that He Himself, Jesus, the Son of God, is the principle of the Creation, of which the Old Testament could only say: "God spoke". It is Jesus whom the Scripture, and indeed all the Prophets, mean. He, Jesus, is the content of all previous speech, which took place under God's orders. Previously — so we may paraphrase the meaning of the Prologue — the Revelation of God assumed the form of the Word, of speech; now, however, its form is no longer this merely pro- visional, indirect form — a "pointer" to something beyond, but now the form of revelation is Himself, the One who speaks and acts in His own Person. Therefore the predicate "Logos", "Word", has become an inaccurate expression. For a Person is not a spoken word, but One who speaks, who, however, for that very reason is not merely One who speaks, but One who acts, a living, active "Subject". A Word is not a Subject, but it is the function of a subject. Jesus, however, is not a "function" but a "subject". And He Himself, not His speech, is the revela- tion proper, even though His speaking is part of Himself, as well as His action and His suffering. Hence the Johannine Prologue — in order to make this situation quite plain — has set alongside of the idea of the "Logos" the ideas of "Light" and "Life", The one concept of "Word" cannot now express everything that revelation means in the Old Testament. Behold! more than the "Word" is here — God Himself is here! The
• Cf. Theol. Worterbuch. IV, p. 138. 24
REVELATION AS THE WORD OF GOD
prophetic "Word" is full of force and power — "Is not my Word like as a fire?" saith the Lord, "and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces ?"i But here the atmosphere is different. "Light" and "Life" are not characteristics of the "Word", but they are equally valid terms to describe Jesus Christ Himself in Person, as the self -manifestation of God.
The opening verses of the First Epistle of John show that this is the meaning; obviously, here the Logos is deliberately paraphrased in order that it may become clear that this is more than "Word": not only: "That which we have heard", but — ■ "that which we have seen . . . and . . . beheld, . . . and . . . handled. "2 The correlation of "Word" and "hearing" which the spoken word clearly implies, is no longer the only meaning ; it is expanded and enriched by equally valid terms: to see, to behold, to touch, and to handle. Hence the Logos is no longer only the Word about life, as it was with the Prophets, but it is "the Word of Life", 3 which may also be described as the "Bread of life"4 or the "Light of life". 5
This event which John has summed up in such a pregnant phrase is in harmony with the whole outlook of the New Testament. Henceforth revelation is no longer a "Word", but Himself; it is true, He may also be called the "Word";^ it is not necessary, however, to apply this term to Him, who cannot be fully expressed in any of these conceptions, because He, as Person, is beyond and above all intellectual concepts. Certainly this does not mean that the idea of the "Word of God" has disappeared from the witness of revelation. There is still an excellent relation between the revelation and the spoken word ; but with the Incarnation of the Word the meaning of the formula, the "Word of God", has been drastically altered. The spoken word is now no longer the revelation itself, or, to put it more exactly, it is no longer directly "revelation", but only indirectly. The spoken word is an indirect revelation when it bears witness to the real revelation: Jesus Christ, the personal self-manifestation of God, Emmanuel. The spoken word, the "word" in the actual sense of speech, "saying some- thing in words", has thus been relegated to a secondary position, because the first place is now occupied by Him to whom the Old Testament prophetic Word pointed as the Coming One. Hence the meaning of the Old Testament revelation has now — and only now — been fulfilled, and its fulfilment is the Man
' Jer. 23: 29. 2 I John 1:1. 3 i John i: i.
4 John 6: 48. 5 John 8: 12. * Rev. 19: 13.
25
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
in whom God Himself is present: speaking, acting, suffering, reigning.
Further, this also implies that man's "reaction" to this revelation can no longer be simply described by the word "hearing". The relation has now become as personal as the revelation is personal. We are here no longer concerned with a relationship in "word", but with a personal relation: no longer are we content to "believe it" , but our one concern is to come to Him, to trust Him, to be united to Him, to surrender to Him. Revelation and faith now mean a personal encounter, personal communion. He has come, in order that He may be with us, and that we may be with Him;^ He has given Himself for us, that we may have a share in Him.^ Whatever the significance of the "word", of "speech", may be in this happen- ing, and its significance is great and indispensable — one thing is clear : it has still been relegated to the second place, it is a servant of the revelation; it is not the revelation itself. The "Word" — in the sense of speech or doctrine or preaching — is witness to Him, pointing to Him, the story of Him, of what He has done, and teaching about what He is. Our service to Him, to whom both act and speech are subject, is gathered up into this twofold activity of the historical recording of events and the doctrine which interprets their meaning.
It is therefore no accident that the Johannine Gospel in particular, which begins with the concept of the Logos, and thus describes Jesus directly as the Word of God, only uses this term in the Prologue, and nowhere else in the Gospel. The use of the idea of the Logos, therefore, does not mean that Jesus is the Word, but that the "Word" is Jesus. All that was called the "Word" in the Old Testament, all that was indicated in the Old Testament narrative of the Creation by the words "and God said", all that had to be said in words in the Old Testament, is now here Himself in Person, no longer merely in speech about Him. It is for this reason that the One whom men describe as the Logos, may also be described in other terms : Light, Life, and above all: Son of God.
In order to make it clear that this change has taken place, henceforth the expression "Logos, Word of God" will no longer be used. The way in which the Early Church spoke of the Logos, and in which the orthodox theological tradition still does so, betrays an alien influence, not in accordance with the testimony of the Bible, a train of thought which has been
' Matt. i8: 20; 28: 20. ^ Cf. John 15: 4; 17: 23.
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introduced into Christian thought by Greek philosophy from the thought-world of speculation concerning the Logos.
Certainly we can say — and indeed we shall have to say, as we shall see — that in Jesus Christ God "speaks" with us. But this expression is no longer, as in the case of the prophetic Word, an adequate expression; it has become inaccurate. For a Person is certainly not a speech, in spite of the fact that without speaking he can "say" a good deal to us through his life and his work. In the fact that the "Word became flesh", God's way of "speaking" has changed from the literal "speaking" (through the Prophets); it has become a more figurative way of "speaking". The vessel "speech" could no longer contain the content of this new form of divine revelation. The prophetic "Word" — however fully it may be understood as God speaking — is still "only speaking" about Him who is Himself not a "speech" but a Being, a personal Being, and indeed a Person whose whole aim it is to come to us as the One of whom the Prophets spoke. As in the Old Covenant the Word of Jahweh "came" to the Prophets, so now Jesus has "Qome", As the Prophets used to say: "Thus saith the Lord", so Jesus says: "But I say unto you." The fact that He Himself takes the place of the spoken word is precisely the category which distinguishes the Old Testament revelation — the revelation through speech — from the New Testament revelation, the revelation in Christ.
Should someone object, and say, on the contrary, that Jesus Christ alone is the "Word of God" in the full sense of the word, he is really saying what I am saying here, only he is saying it on the basis of a misunderstanding. For he has not realized that when we say that Jesus is the real Word of God we alter the simple meaning of the notion "word", since a person is different from a spoken word. If I describe Jesus as the "real Word" I render the formula, the "Word of God", inaccurate; it then becomes symbolic language, just as it would be were I to say that the music of Bach "says" more to me than any poem.
Thus we really mean the same thing : but to avoid confusion it is important to be quite clear on this point : that the more we emphasize the fact that God's speaking alone is real speech, that Jesus Christ alone is the real Word of God, the more we are moving away from the direct use of the idea, the "W^ord of God", to the indirect. The Word which has been formulated in human speech is now only revelation in an indirect sense; it is revelation as witness to Him.
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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
This truth is of decisive importance for theology; only by its means will it be possible to repair the damage inflicted on Western theology by the Logos theologians, who infected Christian thought with their sterile intellectualism. This over- emphasis upon the intellectual aspect of the Faith came out in two facts — both of them well known — but, as it seems to me — never fully understood. The first of these facts was the equation of the "Word" of the Bible with the "Word of God"; this produced the doctrine of Verbal Inspiration, with all its disastrous results; the second fact was the view of revelation as "revealed doctrine". Behind both these facts there lies a misunderstanding of the idea of the Logos as expressed in the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel. But these two facts simply mean that the view of revelation given in the New Testament was abandoned in favour of an Old Testament idea of revela- tion— with a strongly rational element — thus, that the Divine revelation is a spoken Word of God, and even a doctrine. It is obvious that once this had been accepted, the idea of faith, and the understanding of the Christian life as a whole, of what it means to be a Christian, was coloured by the same misunder- standing. Here, however, we cannot deal with this problem any further. Our immediate question is: What is the basis upon which the Church can carry on its teaching work ?
Orthodoxy, which understands revelation as revealed doc- trine, finds it very easy to establish correct doctrine. All one has to do is to formulate the revealed doctrine — in a formal sense — for purposes of instruction, in a systematic or cate- chetical form. The doctrine is already there, in the revelation. We find it impossible to take this enviable short-cut; but we are also aware at what a price this short-cut was purchased, what terrible consequences sprang from it, and indeed, that these consequences are still bearing their own fruit. Hence we know that we shall not have to regret choosing the longer way. Another "short-cut", which is not warranted, exists, where the question is put: "How can revelation, which is not doctrine, become doctrine?" and is answered by pointing to the fact of the testimony to the revelation, without which indeed Jesus would not be present for us at all. Up to a point, of course, this observation is correct, and in the next chapter we shall be dealing with the question of this testimony. But: although the connexion between the testimony of Christ and Jesus Christ Himself is very close, they are not identical. Jesus is not the testimony, but He is the revelation. The question
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REVELATION AS THE WORD OF GOD
should, therefore, be thus expressed: How docs legitimate human speech about Jesus, about God, arise out of the revela- tion, which is Jesus Christ Himself, and therefore is not a spoken word ? Is there a point of identity between the revelation of the Person and the word in human speech ?
Actually this point of identity does exist ; it is the witness of the Holy Spirit. We are now speaking not of the human witness to Jesus Christ, but of the Divine testimony. Before there can be a legitimate human witness, speech about God, genuine, valid testimony to Jesus Christ, there must be a Divine testi- mony to Him, which makes use of human forms of thought and speech — and it is precisely this that is meant by the witness of the Holy Spirit "in" the human spirit. By this we do not mean, first of all, what our fathers used to call the "testimonium spiritus sancti internum" ; for this refers to a situation which we cannot yet presuppose, but which is indeed the result of that of which we are now speaking. For the "testimonium spiritus sancti" means the understanding of the Word of Scripture, of the Apostolic testimony which has already become a human message under the guidance and illumination of the Holy Spirit. Here, however, our question is: How did this "understanding" arise? The Apostles themselves give us the answer: the Spirit of God testified in their hearts that Jesus is the Christ,
This was what took place at Caesarea Philippi — perhaps for the first time — when Jesus for the first time was confessed as the Messiah and the Son of God: "Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. "' This took place because "it was the good pleasure of God . . . to reveal His Son in me"^ — as Paul explains to the Galatians.
The revelation in Christ is not completed with the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus : it only attains its goal when it becomes actually manifest; that is, when a man or woman knows Jesus to be the Christ. Revelation is not a starkly objective process, but a transitive one: God makes Himself known to someone. This revealing action of God is a twofold stooping to man: historically objective, in the Incarnation of the Son, and inwardly subjective, in the witness borne to the Son through the Spirit in the heart of man — first of all, in that of the Apostles. God stoops down to us, in that He who was in "divine form"3 took on Himself human form; and God stoops down to us when He Himself speaks to us in human
• Matt. i6: 17. ^ Gal. i: 15-16. ' Phil. 2: 6.
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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
speech, in the witness of His Spirit, who bears witness to the Son. I
We do not usually pay enough attention to the fact that the expression "in us", "in the heart" is a parabolic expression. This localizing "in" means, when its parabolic dress is removed: "in the form of human inwardness" or "in the form of the human spirit". Here there are two points to note: The Spirit bears witness to our Spirit — that means: He has not become human spirit; and it means: in that He bears witness. He has taken on Himself the manner of existence and the form of action of human spirit-activity. This is the meaning — from the point of view of the Theory of Knowledge — of the New Testament witness of the Holy Spirit: identification of the divine spirit with the human spirit, and at the same time the fact that the Spirit of God and the human spirit confront one another.^ Nowhere does this situation become clearer than where Paul repeats the most inward, the most central experience of faith of the Christian community — in the cry of "Abba", which is sometimes regarded as the cry of the spirit, and sometimes as the witness of the heart illuminated by the Spirit. 3 Thus "The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God";4 so the witness is both the witness of the Holy Spirit and the witness of the believing heart. The same may be said of the confession of Jesus as Lord, which is men- tioned in connexion with the gifts of the Spirit. 5 In such central acts of "knowing", in faith, man experiences the working of the Holy Spirit as a real utterance of God in language and thought familiar to mankind. Only in this Word of the Holy Spirit does the Divine revelation in Jesus Christ become the real, actual word of God to man, in which the parabolic term of the historical revelation, Deus dixit, becomes Deus dicit, which is to be taken literally.
Now there are three points to note: First, even as the Word of the Spirit "in" a human being, the witness of the Spirit to Jesus Christ does not cease to be "over against" him. "The Spirit beareth witness to our spirit." That identification may take place ; but man does not possess the power to achieve this identification. The witness of the Spirit thus can be rightly received by the human spirit, so that the "echo" corresponds to the Word, whose echo it is; but it is also possible that this identity will not take place : the human spirit may, more or less,
' John 16: 14. ■>■ I Cor. 2: 16 fif. 3 Gal. 4: 6; Rom. 8; 15.
4 Rom. 8: 16. 5 i Cor. 12: 3.
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fail to receive the witness of the divine Spirit. We cannot find an unambiguous criterion for the one or for the other. Thus the apostolic testimony to Christ has, it is true, its basis in inspira- tion; but it nowhere claims, eo ipso, to be inspired, either because it is apostolic testimony, or in the whole range and detail of its formulated doctrine.
This first point is very closely connected with the other two points. The second is the fact from which we started: that the real revelation is Jesus Christ, and that the witness of the Spirit points to Him, and to Him only. Functionally, therefore, the witness of the Spirit is subordinated to the revelation in Christ. As the Son is subject to the Father, so the Spirit in His testimony is subject to the Son. As the Son has been sent in order that the Father may be glorified, so the Spirit is sent in order that the Son may be known and glorified as the Son of God. I The witness to the Son constitutes the genuineness, and thus the validity of the witness of the Spirit. And the testimony to the Son constitutes its inexhaustible content. It has been said, it is true, that "The Spirit . . , shall guide you into all the truth" ;- but this future is a Future Imperfect, it never becomes a Future Perfect; this process of witnessing, this teaching (of the Spirit) is never ended, never finished. From the human standpoint the Spirit retains the right to teach mankind more and more clearly, never, however, establishing once for all a definitive doctrine, "dogma" pure and simple.
Then comes the third point: that the witness of the Spirit is not the whole work of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not only the One who witnesses and speaks. He is also the God who pours out vitality and creates new life. It is true that from this point of view His activity is just as impenetrable and myste- rious as the process of procreation in the natural sense is impenetrable and mysterious: "arcana spiritus efficicia" (Calvin). 3 This is in accordance with the fact (which has already been mentioned) that Christ Himself is not only the Logos, but is also "Life" and "Light"; thus that even His work in the believing human being consists not only in the understanding of the Word, in the believing act of perception, but beyond that in happenings which lie beyond the range of clear knowledge, and indeed even beyond the range of human consciousness. At all these three points the new element in the New Testament revelation, contrasted with the revelation of the Old Testament, becomes evident. The idea which lies behind the theory of
' John i6: 14. » John 16: 13, 3 Institutio, III, i, i.
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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
Verbal Inspiration corresponds to some extent with the Old Testament, prophetic, level of revelation; but it is not in any way in harmony with the New Testament stage of revelation, and precisely for this reason: that, unlike the revelation of the Old Testament, the New Testament revelation is not to be understood simply and solely as the revelation in the "Word". As the Person of Jesus is more than a Word, so the working of the Holy Spirit is more than merely a witness, in spite of the fact that the witness through which, and in which, Christ becomes to us the Word of God, is the Centre of everything. But for this very reason, because neither Jesus Christ nor the working of the Spirit of God who bears witness to Him is adequately defined as "letting the Word of God speak" — so also the testimony to Jesus Christ borne by human speech is never simply the same as the "Word" of God: hence the idea of a Verbal Inspiration of divinely revealed doctrine is entirely inadequate as a definition of the New Testament revelation.
In contrast to the Prophets, therefore, the Apostles do not assert that their teaching activity — all that they say and write — is dictated by the Holy Spirit, but they let us see, quite naturally and without self-consciousness, into the human and psychological process of their apostolic testimony. They know that all that they teach can never exhaust the revelation which God has given in Jesus Christ : that their words, therefore, are only continually renewed attempts to say "it". Hence the freedom with which, without trying to construct a doctrinal "standard", they place one formulation alongside another, and struggle unceasingly to find better forms of expression, and to formulate them as well as they possibly can.
Now for my last point : where the knowledge of Jesus Christ given through the Holy Spirit is concerned, in the very nature of the case there is no difference between the Apostles and the members of the Christian Church, thus also there is none between the Apostles and the Christians of later generations. If it is really true that every Christian is to have the Holy Spirit, indeed that he who "hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His", I there can be no difference. To be united with Christ through the Holy Spirit means: to be directly united with Him.^ Here there is no difference between an ordinary Christian of our
' Kom. 8:9.
' Think of that bold word of Luther: that we, as Christians, "can make new Decalogues, as Paul does in all his Epistles".
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own day and an Apostle. And yet this difference does exist, and it has great significance. Only it is not significant for the content of the revelation, but only for the way in which it is given: namely, for the way in which we, in contrast to the Apostles, receive the Holy Spirit and therefore the knowledge of Christ.
The second generation, and all the succeeding generations, receive faith, illumination through the Spirit, hy means of the witness of the first generation, of the Apostles, the eye-witnesses. ' Jesus Christ is not directly "here" for us, as He was for the disciples. We possess Him only in their narrative which tells us about Him. Their narrative and their doctrine are the means, which God uses, in order to unite us with Him. This is inherent in the very nature of the historical revelation. As an historical revelation, it can only reach us along the historical path, through the testimony of eye-witnesses. But this testimony, in accordance with that to which it points, is not simply an "historic fact"; the Apostles are not for us simply the bio- graphers or chroniclers of Jesus. The historical revelation is something more than an "historic fact". What they have to tell and to teach is indeed the fact that the Word became flesh, that the Son of God has come to us in human form. The Christian message tells us not only of the Crucified Lord who "suffered under Pontius Pilate", but of the Risen Lord, who rose again on the third day; but the Resurrection is not a "fact of world history", it is a fact of the history of the Kingdom of God, which can only be reported by "eye-witnesses" who have "beheld His glory" as the glory "of the only begotten Son, full of grace and truth". ^ The fact of our redemption — the history of salvation — is transmitted by the proclamation of facts, that is, by the testimony of the Apostles, under the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
It is this testimony, then, that stands between us and Christ; not, however, that it may be a barrier, but a bridge. Through this message we may receive the same Holy Spirit, and may therefore receive from the Spirit Himself the witness that He is the Christ, just as they received it. That means, however, that their witness can never be the basis and the object of faith, but only the means of faith. We do not believe in Jesus Christ because we first of all believe in the story and the teaching of the Apostles, but by means of the testimony of their narrative and their teaching we believe, as they do, and in a similar
I Cf. Kierkegaard, Philos. Fragmts. ^ John i : 14.
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spirit of freedom. I Faith in Jesus Christ is not based upon a previous faith in the Bible, but it is based solely upon the witness of the Holy Spirit ; this witness, however, does not come to us save through the witness of the Apostles — that apostolic testimony to which our relation is one of freedom, and, although it is true, it is fundamental for us, it is in no way dogmatically binding, in the sense of the theory of Verbal Inspiration. The Scripture — first of all the testimony of the Apostles to Christ — is the "Crib wherein Christ lieth" (Luther). ^ It is a "word" inspired by the Spirit of God; yet at the same time it is a human message; its "human character" means that it is coloured by the frailty and imperfection of all that is human.
' (ierman: Autopistie . . . "self-evidence of faith." (Tr.)
z "Vorrede auf das Alte Testament", Bindseil-Niemeyer, VII, 303.
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CHAPTER 5
DOCTRINE AND THE WITNESS OF FAITH
The witness of the Apostles, by means of which they were able to perform their "service of the Word", is twofold in character: it is the story of Jesus, and it is the teaching about Jesus. This dual character of their witness is in harmony with the actual fact of revelation: that the "Word became flesh". The revela- tion of God in Jesus Christ is not itself a doctrine, but a Person, with His story.
The fact that the first disciples told the story of Jesus was not a mistake, nor was it a deviation from the right path. It is not due to a misunderstanding that the stories of Jesus are called the "Four Gospels". They are unique, for they contain the very heart of the Gospel. It was therefore an exaggeration — which had an unfortunate influence at the beginning of the theological renewal derived from Kierkegaard — ^when the great Danish thinker maintained that in order to become a Christian, in order to establish the Christian Faith, there was no longer any need of "narrative" or record; all that was required was to state that God became Man.^ God's Providence was more merciful: He gave us the Four Gospels. The stories of Jesus must have played a very great part in the primitive Christian kerygma, just as they do to-day in all healthy and fruitful missionary work. In con- trast to the doctrinal activity of the non-Christian religions or philosophies, the Christian message is, first of all, narrative, not doctrine.
Through the story of Jesus in the Gospels we are ourselves confronted by Him. The fact that the Apostle, the missionary, must above all "tell a story", and can only teach on the basis of this narrative, brings out very clearly the distinctive element in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. In other religions there are doctrines which claim to deal with a supposed "revelation", but there is no story of revelation. To proclaim the Word of God means, in the New Testament, first of all to tell the story of Jesus, of His life and His teaching, of His sufferings, His death and His resurrection. So long as the Church is vitally aware of this, the idea of the "Word of God" is not in danger of being mis- understood in ultra-intellectual "orthodox" terms. Conversely, where doctrine is emphasized at the expense of the Biblical
' Kierkegaard, Philos. Brocken, pp. 94 fE.
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narrative, there the intellectualistic misunderstanding of ortho- doxy has already begun.
Reformation theology, if measured by this standard, cannot be wholly acquitted from the reproach of having confused the Word of God with doctrine; just as we cannot fail to be amazed at its one-sided doctrinal instruction, based on the Catechism, not only on didactic grounds, but also on those of theology.
The Reformers constantly maintained that the mere "story" of Jesus was of no use to faith; up to a point, of course, they were right, for in actual fact the mere story is as powerless to awaken faith as mere doctrine. It is essential to the witness to the Incarnate Son of God that the story of Jesus and the teach- ing about Jesus should be indissolubly united. Even the narra- tive as such cannot give us "Himself". A "sound film" of the life of Jesus taken by a neutral reporter, or an account of the life of Jesus written by an unbelieving compiler — such as Josephus, for instance — would not have the power to awaken faith in Jesus. But the Gospel narratives of the New Testament are not neutral, for they do not give an "objective" account. They are not photographs but portraits; they are not merely narratives of something that happened, they are testimonies in the form of narrative. This result, which the New Testament research of our generation, in the sphere of criticism, has undoubtedly brought out very clearly, has not yet been fully integrated into theo- logical thought : even the telling of a story may be a testimony to Christ, indeed this is the primary form of the primitive Christian witness. This fact is so significant because it shows very clearly that the essential Gospel, the "Word of God", the revelation, is contained, not in the words spoken by the witness, but in that to which he bears witness.
Here the oft-repeated formula, that "witness" is the act of "pointing", gains its clearest meaning. We cannot "point" away from ourselves to "the other" more clearly than by em- phasizing the fact that the story we tell is itself the whole point of our message, that it is itself "the Gospel". The story of Jesus makes it very plain that it is not what we say that matters, but Himself — so we must look away to Him, Himself. The story of Jesus with this absolute emphasis: He of Whom I tell you is the revelation of God — that is the meaning of all the Gospel narratives, and the form of the earliest witness to Jesus Christ.
It is certainly no accident, but is actually in the highest degree significant, that the Risen Lord Himself said: "Ye shall
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be My witnesses. "^ Only when the "Hfe of Jesus" is seen and narrated from that standpoint is it truly a witness, is it a "Gospel", and not merely a series of "anecdotes about Jesus". ^ It is the Jesus who proved Himself to be the Christ in the Resurrection, whose earthly life and words are to be narrated. The orientation towards this point, which alone makes the picture correct in the sense of testimony, is, however, only pos- sible, and can therefore only then shape the narrative, of one whose eyes have been opened by the Holy Spirit, so that in the picture of the Crucified he is able to "behold" the "Glory of God, full of grace and truth". Thus the Holy Spirit at the first "spoke" in the Apostles, so that they were able to see the picture of the earthly Jesus, of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, as that of the Messiah and the Son of God. The picture of His earthly life came first; the fact that it gradually dawned on them that this was the picture of the Messiah was the first sign that the Holy Spirit was witnessing in their hearts. Accordingly, this is why the narrative of the acts and words of Jesus the Messiah was the first form in which they gave their own testi- mony. We ask : How did the Primitive Church carry on its mis- sionary work? How did the Apostles carry out their calling as witnesses of Jesus ? The standard answer to this question is not the Corpus of the Apostolic Epistles — they were written to communities which were already Christian — but the Gospel narratives. The "Gospels" represent the finest missionary preaching of the Apostolic period, of which otherwise we know so little.
Because the Word became flesh, the story of Jesus had to be told, and this story about Him is the primary witness ;3 but because the Word became flesh, alongside of the witness in story form, there had to be the witness in doctrinal form. In the narrative-witness the revelation is emphasized as the Act of God; in the witness in doctrinal form, the revelation is empha- sized as the Word of God. Neither can be separated from the other; nor can they ultimately be distinguished from one another. For just as the story of Jesus, as the story of the Messiah Jesus, the Son of God, already contains "doctrine", so the doctrine of Christ as the doctrine of the Incarnate, Crucified, and Risen Son of God, already contains the "story". And yet the difference between the teaching of the Apostles and their
' Acts 1 : 8.
* Cf. K. L. Schmidt, Die Stellung der Evangelien in derallg. Literaturgeschichte, Festschrift fiir H. Gunkel, 1923; and other works on Formgeschichte. 3 Cf. Theol. Worterbuch, IV, p. 121.
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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
Gospel narrative is obvious. It is the task of the doctrinal testi- mony to make the subject of these deeds and words, of this suffering and victory, visible, which is invisible in the narrative as such. While this is only suggested in the narrative of the Gospels, it comes out clearly in the doctrinal testimony. Just as the narrative moves deliberately, in order to show who He is, and what is His secret, within the sphere of time and space, so the doctrine develops gradually, within the sphere of thought, in order to make the meaning of the mystery clear. .
If, however, we go back to the origin of both, to the point at which "it pleased God to reveal His Son in me"; that is, where the revelation becomes the Word of God, then we perceive that an important change has taken place between this point and the witness. Peter, who was the first to confess Jesus as the Christ, because this "was not revealed unto him by flesh and blood, but by the Father in heaven", does not tell the story of Jesus, nor does he teach about Christ. His confession, the primi- tive form of his witness, is still accomplished in the dimension of personal encounter: "Truly Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God!" The original form of all genuine witness is the confession of faith in the form of the answering "Thou", evoked by the "Thou"-word of God addressed to the soul. This is true not only of the confession of the Apostle, but also of the confession of every true believer, of that "Abba, Father", which the Holy Spirit utters, evoking the response of faith in the same inspired words. The act of faith is a confession in the form of prayer, in the dimension "Thou-I";^ it is not a doctrinal state- ment in the third person: "He-you".
Thus the first step in the development of the doctrinal testi- mony is to move away from the "Thou-relation" to God; this signifies a change of front: from God towards the world. In doctrine man speaks no longer in the "Thou"-form to God — as in the original confession of faith — but he now speaks about God as "He". Doctrine is no longer a spontaneous, personal re- sponse, in the form of prayer, to the Word of God, but already, even in its simplest form, it is reflective speech about God. The process of leaving the sphere of personal encounter in order to enter into the impersonal sphere of reflection is the presupposi- tion of all doctrine. God is now no longer the One who speaks, but the One who is spoken about. It is no longer God who is addressed, but a person, or a number of people. This change of dimension, this transition from the personal sphere into the
' Cf. Offenbarung und Vernimft, pp. 119 ff. 38
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DOCTRINE AND THE WITNESS OF FAITH
impersonal, is the same as that of reflection. Hence all doctrine is reflective; but all doctrine does not represent a process of reflection to the same extent. The extent to which the personal relation is broken by the impersonal depends on the extent of reflection and also of the didactic element. The more that God becomes an object of instruction, instead of being One who is addressed with believing fervour, the further the doctrine moves away from the direct confession of faith, the more it becomes theoretical and doctrinal. It is an essential characteristic of the Biblical "doctrine", and especially of that of the New Testament, that it contains a minimum of doctrinal reflection. ' Doctrine (or teaching) continually passes into worship, thanks- giving and praise, into the immediacy of personal communion. This comes out very clearly in a second process of refraction in that which we describe as "doctrine".
The witness of the Apostles, as a personal confession of faith, is always at the same time a call to obedience. The "Thou" has not disappeared: it has only changed its vis-d-vis. The Apostle who is both witness and teacher no longer addresses God, but he speaks in the Name of God to Man. "We beseech you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God."^ All apostolic teaching is speech which calls for faith and obedience, speech which tries to win others, which tries to bring others within the circle of those who believe. Even where the Apostle is giving direct "teaching", what he says is more than a "lecture". Even in this teaching, in spite of the fact that God is being "spoken about" the "Thou"-relation still determines the attitude of the speaker and the tendency of his message, because, and in so far as, the speaker addresses man in the Name of God: with the authority of a Divine commission, in absolute harmony with the God who reveals Himself to him. Thus such teaching, even where it takes place in the third person, for the sake of this "Thou", is not really reflective. It is not what we usually mean by "doctrine"; it is witness which demands an answer.
This witness, which is also a summons to faith and obedience, already differs in a significant way from instruction, as, for instance, the instruction of catechumens for Baptism in the Early Church. It is true that here also the faith of the learners is the aim, but it is not the immediate aim. The change to the third person, to teaching-about-God, goes deeper than in the
• The very word "teaching" or "doctrine" has a far less theoretical and academic meaning in the New Testament than it has to-day. Cf . article on diddoKeiv in the Worterbuch z. N.T., II, pp. 147 ff. » 2 Cor. 5: 20.
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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
witness of faith; the extension into the dimension of the third person covers and includes a wider sphere, more time is given to a reflective, and rather more scholastic, form of teaching.
The teaching of the Catechism, with its questions and answers, is directed primarily to the intellect; the subject must be under- stood, and to this end it is explained. Here we no longer hear — or if we do, only from very far off — that urgent cry: "Be ye reconciled to God! Repent!" But the deflection of the pupil's mind from the sphere of faith, of existence in the "Thou"- dimension by doctrinal teaching, is strictly limited to the explanation of that which is elementary and necessary. It is only the intellectual questions which clamour for consideration which lead to that theoretical extension which we call "theo- logy" or "dogmatics".
In this sphere reflection predominates: thought and prayer are separated, not, it is true, in principle, but in practice. The teacher may, of course, remain aware that the subject he is teaching is his confession of faith, and that the instruction of the pupil ultimately demands the obedience of faith ; but this faith is a distant source and a distant goal. Between both there ex- tends the broad space of mental reflection — and the further it extends the more does the unlikeness increase between the subject that is discussed, and Him whom we address in the response of prayer. The further dogmatics extends, the more remote is its relation to its Primal Source ; the further it drifts away from the confession of faith as "being laid hold of" by God, the more is the personal relation with God replaced by an impersonal one.
The change which this makes in the confession of faith is so great, and the danger of drifting away completely from the Origin and from the Goal is so acute, that we must ask ourselves why, then, does this take place? Now we understand all those objections — already mentioned — to the study of dogmatic theology; we must, therefore, repeat the question: Why does this change have to take place ? Why should it take place ? But we have not forgotten the answer which was given earlier : The transformation of the adoring confession of faith into a "doc- trine-about-God" must take place — not for its own sake, not because faith itself requires it, but — for the sake of the believer, in face of doctrinal errors or heresies, in face of the questions which necessarily arise in our own minds, and in face of the difficulties which the original Biblical doctrine provides for the understanding.
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DOCTRINE AND THE WITNESS OF FAITH
In the light of the foregoing observations we can now give an answer to three questions, which, apart from these considera- tions, could either not be answered at all or could not be answered clearly. The first is that of the relation between faith and doctrine; the second is that of the difference between the knowledge of faith and theological knowledge; the third con- cerns the limits of theological effort. Obviously the relation between faith and doctrine is twofold in character : Faith springs from doctrine in so far as doctrine springs from faith ; the doc- trine of the Apostle is e/c iriaTGOisels maTLv.^ The Divine revela- tion makes use of the believing testimony of the man on whom Christ has laid hold, in order that he may comprehend more. Faith urges us to preach and to teach; the preaching and the teaching create faith.
The difference between the knowledge of faith and theo- logical knowledge, which is so difficult to define, and yet so necessary, is not one of subject or of content, but one of the form or dimension of existence. Theological or dogmatic know- ledge is, it is true, the knowledge of faith in accordance with its origin, but not with its form. One who thinks in terms of theo- logy must, so long as he does this, pass from the attitude of the worshipper to that of the thinker who is concerned with his subject. Greater clearness and precision of theological con- cepts can only be gained at the cost of directness of faith, and that readiness for action which it contains. While a person is studying theology he is not in the state of the praying and listening disciple, but he is a pupil, a teacher, a scholar, a thinker. This does not mean that theology must inevitably damage faith and obedience, but it does mean that it may harm it — that is, when the temper of the theologian replaces the spirit of the man of prayer, who listens for the Voice of God. This is what we mean by the term "Theologismus" .^ When we see this, however, we also see why it is impossible to draw a sharp line of de- marcation between the truth of faith and theological truth. The distinction is relative in character : the more that reflection and impersonal objectivity predominate, the greater will be the difference.
This brings us to the third question: that of the limitations of the theological enterprise, and answers it. Theology, dog- matics, doctrine in the highest form of reflection, are not "in themselves" necessary. It is not faith itself which urges us
I Rom. i: 17.
* I.e. the danger of putting theology in the place of personal faith. (Tr.)
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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
towards theology, but certain definite impulses within the com- munity of believers, or in the heart of thebeliever himself. Theo- logy is not necessary^unto salvation, but it is necessary within the Church, and necessary for a person who must and will think. This sense of compulsion is one reason for studying dogmatic theology; it justifies its usefulness. On the other hand, in order to keep dogmatic theology within its bounds we may claim that only so much theology is good as can be combined with no injury to the attitude of faith, and to obedience itself. To ignore these limitations is already a symptom of that unhealthy process which we call "Theologismus" ; but this is itself based upon the failure to distinguish plainly between the truth given by faith and theological truth, of the immediate knowledge of faith, and of that refracted by reflection, which must more or less be laid to the charge of the whole of the older theology.
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CHAPTER 6
THE NORM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
All sound doctrine claims to be based on Truth. This is the hall-mark of all right thinking. When the claim is made: "This is what you ought to think about this matter", it rests upon the conviction that to think in this particular way is the right way to think; that is, it is thinking in accordance with Truth. It is this which distinguishes sound doctrine from propaganda; the man who is "out for propaganda" is not concerned with Truth; all he wants to know is whether a particular view will be useful to him for a particular end. Christian doctrine claims to be true doctrine, that is, the true doctrine of God and His relation to Man and the world. The vastness of this claim, as we have seen, is based on the fact that its foundation does not lie in human knowledge, but in divine revelation. But this basis is at the same time a condition; Christian doctrine can only legiti- mately make this unconditional claim to Truth in so far as it is based upon revelation. Thus its basis becomes its criterion and its norm. We now have to inquire how revelation becomes the norm of Christian doctrine. Historical experience, indeed, shows us that this question is not superfluous; the very fact that there is such a variety of Christian doctrine, much of it contradictory, suggests that a mere appeal to revelation is not sufficient to form the basis for the legitimacy of its claim to be the true doctrine.
Because God has revealed Himself there can be, and is, sound Christian doctrine. But the question is: How does this basis of sound doctrine, revelation, become the norm, and thus the criterion of true doctrine? Between the decisive, objective, form of revelation, Jesus Christ, and doctrine, there lies that sub- jective element in revelation which we call "faith", though perhaps it would be better to describe it as that process which is accomplished within the subject. All Christian doctrine regards itself as a confession of faith, as an expression of the fact that the objective form of revelation has become subjective knowledge. Nevertheless, there is the possibility of illusion; for a doctrine may claim to be a confession of faith, and therefore a response to the objective form of revelation, when it is actually very different from that which it claims and seems to be. It may be based upon a misunderstanding of the divine revelation, or
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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
upon opinions which have nothing whatever to do with revelation.
It is true that with the recognition of revelation — in the sense in which we have defined it — as the basis of Christian doctrine, we have already done something to distinguish legiti- mate from illegitimate Christian doctrine. A doctrine which does not appeal to this revelation as its origin, but to some other basis of knowledge, is by this very fact disqualified from the outset; all merely speculative theories, and all relativistic doctrines of God based on Comparative Religion, or on the Psychology of Religion — whatever their value may be in other directions — cannot be recognized as the Christian doctrine of God. In an earlier work of mine^ I have discussed in detail how this exclusive basis of Christian doctrine deals with the various objections of the reason and justifies them; here all this must simply be presupposed. But this appeal to revelation, in the definitely Christian sense, has merely a limiting significance, not a constitutive one, in order to establish the validity of Christian doctrine; it is the "conditio sine qua non", but it is not yet "ratio sufficiens" to establish the legitimacy of the claim of any doctrine to be Christian doctrine. This second step is only accomplished when it can be shown how the revelation, to which the doctrine appeals, becomes for doctrine itself the norm of all its teaching, and even the norm of faith itself.
This transition from the basis to the norm takes place within the Church founded upon the Reformation through the estab- lishment of the "Scriptural principle". Christian doctrine is legitimate, is truly based upon revelation, and the faith which is based upon it is the true knowledge of faith, in so far as this doctrine and this faith agree with the teaching of the Bible.
This Scriptural principle of the Reformation is established in contrast to the principle of Tradition of the Catholic Church, in accordance with which the doctrine of the Church, and especially the exposition of Scripture, made by the highest ecclesiastical doctrinal authority, the Pope alone, ex sese, without any right of appeal on the part of a critic or inquirer to the Holy Scriptures themselves, determines what is Biblical and what is sound doctrine.- The Catholic doctrinal authority, that is, the Pope, is alone qualified to say in a binding authorita- tive manner what Scripture teaches. In setting up this autho-
' Offenbariing tind Vernunft, 2nd Part.
2 See the Appendix on the "Authority of Scripture", and its place in The History of Dogma, pp. 113 ff.
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THE NORM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
rity, however, not in thesi, it is true, but in praxi, the authority of the Church is set above the authority of Scripture, and the Scripture as a critical court of appeal is eliminated ; this position is justified by the fiction that the apostolic ecclesiastical oral tradition contains elements which are not emphasized, or are not sufficiently emphasized in Scripture. Even if one were in- clined to admit some truth in this fiction, it would only be in the sense that such truth is a complement to the Biblical doctrine; but this would not justify it in claiming that it in- validates the Scripture altogether as a critical court of appeal. The true reason is obvious, even though it is never acknow- ledged: the Catholic doctrinal authority, and many of its dogmas, would become insecure, if that court of appeal (i.e. the Bible) were actually allowed to function.
Now, however, what is or should be the basis of the Reforma- tion principle of Scripture? To this question Reformation theology has only been able to give an inadequate answer, because in this theology, alongside of the right view of the authority of Scripture, which distinguishes the revelation in Jesus Christ from the Biblical testimony to it, an erroneous, "orthodox" doctrine of the authority of Scripture was at work, which became increasingly effective.
According to this view there is no question of the authority of Scripture, since the Verbal Inspiration of Scripture and the absolute identity of revelation and Biblical doctrine are the axiomatic presuppositions of all doctrine and of true faith. When the Scriptures are absolutely identified with the Word of God, this axiomatic authority of the doctrine of Scripture, and its absolute character as norm, are taken for granted and need no basis. But if Luther's statement is valid, that Christ is "rex et dominus scripturae" , then certainly the question of the authority of Scripture, and the kind of norm Scripture contains, has been set up.
As in the case of the Reformers, we must express our first principle thus: the Scriptures have the authority of a norm, and the basis for this principle is this: the Scriptures possess this authority because they are the primary witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. ^ This revelation is central, both in the Old and the New Testament, in Christian doctrine as well as in Christian faith. But Jesus Christ comes to us through the witness of the Apostles; this witness has for us the validity of a norm because it is that which bases and creates faith. This is
' Cf. Offenbarung und Vernunft, pp. 124 ff.
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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
the new truth which broke through at the Reformation, and was called to overcome the orthodox axiomatic view of the previous view. "Whatever is concerned with Christ is apostolic." All Christian doctrine is based upon the witness of the Apostles; the primitive witness supports the witness of the Church. ^ The doctrine of the Apostles is the primary medium, through which the revelation comes to us.
This historical priority, and this actual basis, are, however, still not the same as the establishment of a norm. A further element must be added, namely, the concrete priority, the fact that the Apostolic doctrine comes first, before all later forms of doctrine. This pride of place is based on the fact that par- ticular dignity is accorded to the original witness because it still belongs to the actual happenings which constitute the Christian revelation. This is the dignity which is ascribed to the Apostle over against all the later teachers and doctors of the Church: that he, as the first to receive, and indeed to have a share in the historical revelation in Christ, has a special measure of the knowledge of Christ. He, in contrast to all who come later, is the eye-witness of the Resurrection, as he was the eye-witness of the earthly life of Jesus.
But this privileged position is not an absolute one, which can be clearly defined. This comes out in two facts which can be established, objectively, quite plainly:
First of all, in the fact that the circle of the Apostles cannot be rigidly defined: is Paul, Mark, Luke, or the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews an "eye-witness" in the same sense as one of the Twelve? Secondly, in the fact that the doctrines of the Apostles, the doctrines of the New Testament, to a great extent differ from one another. Recourse to "the" doctrine of the New Testament is, in the strictly literal sense of legal doctrinal authority, impossible. The unity of the witness of the New Testament in the strict, unconditional sense of the word, lies solely and alone in Him, the One who is confessed, but not in the teaching of the witnesses. They all stand in a circle round Him, and they all point to Him, each from a different standpoint; their witness indeed points to Him, the One, but the witness of each is different. The refraction of the divine revelation in the human medium of the knowledge of faith and the witness of faith is already at work in the primitive Christian testimony, and can only be argued away either by a forcible imposition of dogma, or by a deliberate resolve to ignore
' Eph, 2: 20. 46
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THE NORM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
the real facts of the situation. Anyone who really listens to the Apostolic witness to Christ feels compelled to seek the unity of the truth of revelation in the very variety of these testimonies.
The priority of this court of appeal, however, also implies its relative character. Like the historical record, so also the theo- logical doctrine of the Apostles must be subjected to critical examination. This criticism cannot result from human rational truths, but only from the revelation in Christ itself, which is attested in the doctrine of the Apostles. Thus it seems to move in a circle : only through the doctrine of the Apostles can criticism be exercised on the doctrine of the Apostles. This circle is, how- ever, only real for those who hold a legalistic "orthodox" view of doctrinal authority.
Actually, this is the point at issue : that the real norm is the revelation, Jesus Christ Himself, who Himself witnesses to us through the Holy Spirit, who, however, in addition to this His self -revelation, makes use of the witness of the Apostles. While we are bound in all absolute sense to the medium, to the means of revelation of the Apostolic witness, we are only bound in a relative sense to the authority of this witness. The absolute authority is Jesus Christ Himself, whom we only possess through the record and the teaching of the Apostles; but He, whom we only have through them, stands above them. Their witness is valid, absolutely binding, in so far as it really witnesses to Him Himself. It is true that, as Luther says: "Whatever is concerned with Christ is apostolic."
A legalistic, immutable authority, such as the human desire for security would so gladly possess — and indeed is offered in an orthodox doctrine of the Scriptures as an axiomatic autho- rity, or in the Catholic doctrine of the infallible doctrinal authority of the Pope — is thus denied to us. The word of Scripture is not the final court of appeal, since Jesus Christ Himself alone is this ultimate authority; but even while we examine the doctrine of Scripture, we remain within the Scrip- tures not, it is true, as an authority, but as the source of all that truth which possesses absolute authority.
Up till now we have spoken of the Scriptures as the sum of the Apostolic testimony to Jesus Christ. This raises two further questions: what is our attitude to the Old Testament as witness to the provisional or preparatory revelation ? And what should be our attitude to the statements of Scripture which do not come under the heading of witness to revelation ?
So far as the Scriptures of the Old Testament are concerned,
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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
the phrase the "Word of God" has far less final validity than in the New Testament. Here, indeed, the still greater variety and lack of unity of the teaching — and also of the narrative — warns us of the necessity for critical distinctions. The orthodox identification of the Word of Scripture with the Word of God could only be maintained at all — so far as the Old Testament was concerned — by leaving the widest possible latitude for allegorical interpretation. The less that the Scriptures are taken literally, the more room is there for freedom of exposition — we might even say, for arbitrary interpretation; then every single ex- positor becomes a kind of Pope who alone possesses the right key to the meaning of the Scriptures. The Scriptures, then, become not a norm of doctrine, but a proof of a doctrine which stands firm independently of it ; it is no longer a critical court of appeal, but it is used merely to cover, or in any case to illus- trate an interpretation of doctrine which is regarded as abso- lutely convincing.
In principle, however, there is the same relation between the Old Testament witness to revelation and revelation itself as there is between the Apostolic witness and Jesus Christ, with this difference only: that over the revelation in the Old Testament itself there stands the word "provisional". It is an essential part of the Christian Faith : it is part of the Apostolic doctrine of the Old Testament, that the revelation which it contains has the character of "prophecy", of pointing forward, and of preparation. My work on the doctrine of revelation has already shown how this should be treated in detail. " The second ques- tion, that concerning the statements of Scripture which do not refer to revelation itself, is simple to answer. In so far as the Bible speaks about subjects of secular knowledge, it has no teaching authority. Neither its astronomical, cosmological picture of the world, nor its geographical view, nor its zoo- logical, ethnographical or historical statements are binding upon us, whether they are in the Old Testament or in the New. Here, rather, free course should be given to rational scientific criti- cism.2 Even in these sections the Scripture remains the sole source of our knowledge of revelation, to which we are absolutely obliged to turn, but it is in no way the norm of our knowledge and our doctrine. We possess revelation through the Bible as a whole, to which statements of all kinds, ideas of the universe
■ Offenbarung uyid Vernunft, pp. 131 ff.
* On the relation between a "Bible-faith" and historical criticism, see Offenbarung und Vernunft, Chap. 18.
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THE NORM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
of the ancient world, Jewish and Early Christian systems of chronology, etc., belong. We cannot disentangle the one from the other, for these cosmological ideas are, moreover, the alpha- bet in which the witness of revelation is spoken to us. But that is no reason why we should confuse the witness itself with this alphabet ; on the contrary, we should try to distinguish the one from the other, although we cannot separate them.
In all this, all we are trying to do is to free the newly dis- discovered Scriptural Principle of the Reformers from the tradi- tional orthodox, formally axiomatic faith in the Bible, and to show clearly what the teachers of the Reformation period never succeeded in doing — although in principle we owe this truth to them. The result of our considerations is this: the Scriptures are the absolute authority, in so far as in them the revelation, Jesus Christ Himself, is supreme. But the doctrine of Scripture as such, although it is the absolute basis of our Christian doc- trine, is only in a conditional sense the norm of the same. Critical reflection on the adequateness, or inadequateness, of the Biblical doctrinal testimony for the revelation to which it bears witness, is not eliminated; we still have to face it; a final resort to a single Scriptural passage is impossible for us. Hence in each instance all Christian doctrine is, and remains, a venture of faith.
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CHAPTER 7
DOGMA AND DOGMATICS
Since Christian doctrine is itself a form of revelation, one of its essential characteristics is a claim to absolute truth and validity, a claim to obedience. If we posit the alternative: either an attitude of "tolerance" with its "relativistic" spirit, or one of dogmatic intolerance, then undoubtedly Christian doctrine is on the side of the latter. But this alternative is false. The fact that various forms of widely divergent "Christian doctrine" have always existed within the Christian Church shows us clearly that the "revelatory" authority of such doctrine is limited. This, as we have seen, is a recognized reason for the necessity of dogmatic theology or dogmatics. The Church is forced to distinguish "sound" doctrine from "unsound", that which conforms to the "orthodox" standard from that which does not.
But while doctrine as such is primarily the individual concern of individual teachers, the Church must endeavour to distinguish "standard" doctrine from that which is not, "sound" doctrine from "unsound" in such a way that it is evident to all that this verdict expresses the view of the Church as a whole. The Church knows that her unity, and the validity of her preaching and her teaching, are seriously endangered by the fact of contradictory doctrines; for that which is con- tradictory cannot be equally true, and the preaching and teaching activity of the Church cannot make a strong claim for the obedience of faith if contradictory doctrines are put forth in the name of the Church. Not only the outward unity, but also the inner unity of the Church, and not only the unity, but also the commission and work of the Church — that is, the task of finding a way into the hearts and minds of men for the divine revelation, are seriously injured if the Church is not in a position to distinguish between that which is the standard and correct doctrine and that which is not.
It is the perception of this fact which lies at the root of the formation of dogma. ^ In order to make this necessary distinc- tion the Church uses the form of a public Confession of Faith. A Confession of Faith is primarily a spontaneous and individual expression of faith; the individual Christian "confesses" — for
' On the history of the conception of dogma, see below, pp. 103 ff.
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DOGMA AND DOGMATICS
instance when summoned before a tribunal — his Christian faith. Secondly, there is the "Confession of Faith" in the form of Christian preaching and teaching. Every Christian preacher and teacher — even the simplest father of a family who instructs his children in the Christian Faith — teaches others by the very fact of "confessing" his faith, and he confesses his faith before others in order to teach them. This, however, does not mean that the Church as a whole may feel the necessity to confess its faith publicly and in common. This may take place first of all in the body of the local Church as a whole, in the gathering for public worship, as part of the response of the local Church in thanksgiving and praise to the Word of God which is pro- claimed, as a liturgical act; it may also take place in a universal form, including all the Churches as a whole, if the occasion arises.
This occasion, however, does arise when the Church sees that her commission and her unity are menaced by the variety of contradictory doctrines. It is then that there arises what is called, in the narrower sense of the word, the "ecclesiastical Confession of Faith", the Credo, or the dogma. The aim of this common confession is to express the true faith, and to fix a standard of doctrine. Thus the Church sets up a norm of faith and doctrine which is intended to act as a means of separation, as a criterion of "sound" versus "unsound" doctrine. The need for such an instrument to scrutinize and criticize doctrine is all the more urgent since doctrinal aberrations affect not only details of secondary importance, but also the heart of Christian doctrine, the truth of revelation itself.
Since the reasons which force the Church to work out such a "Confession" are almost always operative everywhere, it is not surprising that the Church — in its various branches — has continually felt obliged to set up such norms of faith and doctrine as should provide a "standard", and give the right direction to Christian belief, especially at times where the essence of faith and doctrine was gravely menaced. But the history of the formation of Creeds shows equally clearly both its inevitability and its problems and dangers.
The first and most important question is of the authority of the Confession which is thus formulated. The Roman Catholic Church claims for her "confession" absolute, final validity, a claim which includes the whole sphere of faith. While the ancient Catholic Church, the Church of the earlier centuries, claimed this authority for the (Ecumenical Church Council,
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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
constituted according to ecclesiastical law, and thus established and based this claim, up to the time of the Council of Trent, upon the theory of the infallibility of (Ecumenical Councils rightly gathered together, in the Vatican the already very ancient predominance of the Curia won the victory, which thus established the Papal teaching-office as the sole final court of appeal, and thus gave to it absolute doctrinal authority, established by the law of the Church. ^
The Confessional writings of the period of the Reformation, on the whole, share the ancient Catholic view of the absolute teaching authority of the Church — certainly on the pre- supposition, silently assumed by the Lutheran Church, and explicitly stated by the Reformed Churches — that the Con- fession of the Church must agree with the norm of Holy Scripture. In both cases belief in the unassailable doctrinal authority of the rightly constituted Church Council representing the whole Church is the controlling factor. Two ideas lie behind this view: firstly, a very strong belief in the effective spiritual power of the Christian community, as compared with the isolated individual believer, or the individual teacher or preacher; secondly, there is a dangerous over-emphasis on the authority of the Christian community and its ecclesiastical organization as the guarantee of Truth.
The acceptance of this principle of the authority of the Confession of Faith is all the more surprising, since the Refor- mation arose when Luther threw down his challenge, which shook the very bases of this ecclesiastical authority. Who, then, can guarantee that the few hundred Churchmen, who consti- tute the Synods which create Confessions of Faith, grasp the meaning of the divine authority and express it in their teaching, while the individual thinker who contradicts them has no such authority ? Who, then, gives to the Church Council the authority to give an interpretation of Holy Scripture, which is binding for faith? In any case, it is a fact that all previous Confessions, without exception, contain cosmological elements which are in opposition to our scientific knowledge. ^ Thus doctrinal statements were formulated, with absolute authority, believed to be based upon the divine revelation itself, which have since proved to be mistaken, even though only in part, and on points of secondary importance.
' Romani Pontificis definitiones ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae, irreformabiles esse" {"Vaticanum", in Denzinger, 1839).
^ Think, for instance, of the idea of an historical "Fall" of "Adam" — cf. my anthropology Man in Revolt, Chapters 5 and 6.
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DOGMA AND DOGMATICS
Thus, both the fundamental perception of the possibility of error of even the most Biblical of ecclesiastical Councils, as well as the testimony of fact, agree that the "Confession", or Credo, or dogma, of the Church can only possess limited authority; this implies the possibility of further light being given to the Church on any particular problem. In principle dogma comes under the same provisional authority as the doctrine of the individual teacher. On the other hand, as an act of the whole Church, by which we may assume that particular care in critical exarriination will be exercised, an act in which, above all, we have the promise of genuine fellowship in faith, there may be ascribed to it a particular relative authority or dignity.
This estimate of dogma alone corresponds to the fundamental view of the Reformation; it constitutes the essential charac- teristic which distinguishes the Protestant from the Roman Catholic understanding of Faith and revelation. For the Catholic believer, as for the individual Catholic teacher, the dogma of the Church is fixed, it is the final court of appeal in matters of religious truth; for the Protestant teacher, on the other hand, the dogma, whether that of his own Church in particular, or that which is common to all the Churches, is, it is true, a court of appeal of the highest importance, which he will find it difficult to ignore, but it is never ihe final authority, forcing him to suppress his own view entirely. That is why the Protestant Churches do not set up a fixed system of "dogma", but instead, they have "Confessions of Faith".
The danger of turning dogma into an absolute is one danger, but there is a second one — certainly closely connected with the first, which is, if possible, still greater. The doctrine of the Church is always the Confession, the expression, but not the object of faith. The Object of faith is the revelation, Jesus Christ Himself, not the Credo of the Church. But if this Creed of the Church is wrongly equated with absolute Truth, then it is almost impossible to avoid setting it up as the actual object of faith. Faith becomes faith in dogma, belief in an authoritative human doctrine ; it then ceases to be what it is according to the teaching of the Bible: faith in the truth of revelation, which can never be equated with any human doctrine at all.^ The revelation is Jesus Christ Himself, not a doctrine about Jesus Christ. In true faith we have to do with Jesus Christ Himself, not with a doctrine about Him. The doctrine points to Him;
' We owe an abiding debt of gratitude to W. Herrmann for the way in which he continually pointed out this fundamental contradiction.
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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
its aim is to show Him, and to make Him plain and visible before the eyes of men.
Doctrine, rightly understood, is the finger which points to Him, along which the eye of faith is directed towards Him. So long as faith clings to the "finger", to the interpretative doctrine, it has not really arrived at its goal; thus it is not yet actually faith. Faith is the encounter with Him, Himself, but it is not submission to a doctrine about Him, whether it be the doctrine of the Church, or that of the Apostles and Prophets. The transference of faith from the dimension of personal en- counter into the dimension of factual instruction is the great tragedy in the history of Christianity. The Reformers were right when they rejected the unconditional authority of ecclesi- astical doctrine as such; but when the theologians of the Reformation began to believe in a doctrine about Jesus Christ, instead of in Jesus Christ Himself, they lost the best fruit of the Reformation. Reformation theology was right in setting up the Biblical doctrinal authority above the ecclesiastical authority as their norm; but they were wrong, when they made the Biblical doctrine their final unassailable authority, by identi- fying the Word of God with the word of the Bible. When they did this, in principle, they relapsed into Catholic error; the Protestant faith also became a doctrinal faith, belief in dogma, only now the Biblical dogma took the place of the doctrine of the Church. Protestant orthodoxy arrested the development of the Reformation as a religious awakening.
This distinction between "Jesus Christ Himself" and the doctrine about Him, as final authority, must not, however, be misunderstood in the sense of separation. We do not possess "Jesus Christ Himself" otherwise than in and with the doctrine about Him. I But it is precisely this doctrine, without which we cannot have "Him Himself", which is not Himself, and there- fore has only a relative authority. This authority increases the more plainly and clearly it is connected with Jesus Christ Himself. Thus it is precisely the duty of a genuinely religious — which means, also, a genuinely critical — system of dogmatics to undertake a careful examination of this necessary, obvious connexion between Jesus Christ and the doctrine concerning Him.
Dogma, that is, the Confession of Faith of the whole Church, does not come into being without much thought and effort on the part of theologians. It is the faith of the Church, it is true,
' Cf. K. Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, 1, i, p. 142,
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DOGMA AND DOGMATICS
which it expresses; the faith which in principle is held by each individual living member of the Church. But the spontaneous individual faith knows no definitive, authoritative and ex- clusive formulation. It is true that out of the common life of the worshipping community the main belief, shared by all, may be continually expressed in the form of the common Confession of Faith, as, for instance, the phrase, Kvpios xptcn-ds-, was undoubtedly a confessional formula of the Primitive Christian Church, spontaneously arising out of the worship of the Church. Further, the expansion of this very simple, and earliest. Christian Confession into the threefold Baptismal formula which forms the core of the Apostles' Creed, may have arisen spontaneously without special theological reflection. But what a gulf there is between these simple forms of the Creed of the Church and the Confessional writings of the period of the Reformation, as, for instance, the Apology of Melanchthon (for the Augsburg Confession) or the Second Helvetic Con- fession !
However, not only elaborate doctrinal confessions of this kind, which are absolute masterpieces of the theological craft, but also the "symbols" (creeds) of the Early Church, which arose out of the controversies of the third to the fifth centuries, are the result of theological, "dogmatic" labour — their formu- lated doctrines, with their intellectual acumen and their antithetical character, could never be regarded as expressions of a naive, spontaneous, unreflective faith, but only as products of the highest intellectual activity, willingly devoted to the preservation of the purity of the treasure of the faith of the Church. They may be compared with the artificial "settings" with which the jeweller surrounds the pearl as a natural pro- duct, in order to protect it from loss and destruction, and in order to enhance its beauty. The dogma is an artificial product of theological reflection, whose "art" must be shown in the fact that it exactly fits the form of the "pearl", that is, that upon a foundation of extreme intellectual activity, it lays stress upon the essential element in faith, brings it out, so to speak, and defends it against all misunderstandings that may threaten it.
Now, however, the simple question: "What, then, is the chief thing in our Faith?" springs from an abstract process of reflection, and indeed evokes another. But this is still more true of the question: "What is the distinctive element in our faith which must be defended against the erroneous belief which menaces our Church?" The history of dogma in the
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Early Church, therefore, shows how much patient and pene- trating theological labour, in thought and reflection, preceded the formation of these short classical credal formulas. If we compare the language of these dogmas with the language of the New Testament the difference is obvious. The terminology of the doctrine of the Trinity of the Athanasian Creed, and indeed even that of the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed, is alien to the New Testament. The latter does not contain the terms homousios, the "Persons" , the Trinity; we may say, however, that the New Testament possessed all the elements which were ready for this process of development: the New Testament provides the premises; dogma draws the conclusions. But in order to perceive the truth that these non-reflective, un- systematic, scattered, and (from the theological point of view), naive ideas of the New Testament are the premises from which this conclusion may be drawn, a vast amount of abstract work was required, in the shape of the analysis and formulation of ideas, and the classification of these ideas in systematic form. Between the formulas of the New Testament and those of the Athanasian Creed there lie four centuries of the most intensive theological, "dogmatic", intellectual toil. In this sense we may, and must, say: dogma is the product of dogmatics.
This, however, is only one side of the question. The second becomes plain when we start from the position of the Catholic theologian. For the Catholic theologian of the present day dogma is that which is "given", behind which he cannot, and may not, go. His intellectual labour, therefore, can only aim at the interpretation and explanation of dogma; it is not his concern, or his duty, to examine the dogma critically, in the endeavour to replace it by a better dogma. Thus his work can only be called "dogmatics" in the sense that it is subordinated to, directed by, dogma; it must start from dogma and return to dogma, and moreover to the given dogma, not to the dogma as an idea or a postulate. The same is true, even if only in a limited way, of the work of every ecclesiastical dogmatic theo- logian. Even the believing Lutheran theologian starts from his Augsburg Confession and returns to it, just as the believing Reformed theologian does with his Second Helvetic Confession.
He does not want, first of all, to create or prepare a new- dogma, but, by using his brain, to penetrate, expound and secure the right understanding of the Confession of Faith of
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his own Church. His dogmatics, too, is determined by the given dogma, starts from it and returns to it again.
And yet the difference between the Cathohc theologian and his Protestant colleague is very great, though this comes out far more clearly in the case of the Reformed, than of the Lutheran, theologian. The very fact that in the Reformed Churches there is nothing which corresponds to these really standard Lutheran Confessional writings is characteristic. There are a large number of Reformed Confessional works, which differ a good deal from one another, none of which possesses the "canonical" validity which is ascribed to both the Lutheran documents. Hence the Reformed theologian, from time immemorial, and down to the present day, has a much freer attitude towards dogma than the Lutheran.
But both are aware — if they have not become completely petrified in that confessional othodoxy which leads back to Catholicism — that the "Confession" of the Church is a product of human labour, and for that reason is, in principle, capable of error, and probably needing reform. For this reason, even if to a greatly varying extent, they are critical of the dogma of their Church, and in so far as this is their attitude, their dog- matic work is fundamentally directed towards a reformed type of dogma. Thus "dogmatics" acquires the meaning of a critical examination of the "given" doctrine, and a forward-looking preparation of a new and better Confession of Faith.
This, however, creates a curious dualism in all dogmatic labour. The ecclesiastical Confession was indeed created with the very aim of establishing the doctrine of the Church as a norm, in order to arrest the development of arbitrary views and tendencies dangerous to faith. The Confession therefore is meant to be binding, and indeed rather more binding in the realm of doctrine and of teaching than in the sphere of faith and in the belief of Christian men and women.
The Church is impelled to formulate dogmas, not because there are different kinds of faith, but because there are varieties of doctrine. Thus it should be the Church's endeavour to instruct, direct, and to some extent control the teachers of the Church by its dogma. Thus in the mind of the Church the work of the theologian is primarily an explication of the given dogma. On the other hand, in the interest of the authority of the revelation itself — rightly understood — the Church should not hamper the intellectual freedom of its recognized teachers, but should give them every facility for the critical examination
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of their present Confession of Faith, in order to extend its scope.
Thus the theologian stands on the threshold which both separates the existing Confession of Faith from the future, improved Confession, and also serves as a point of transition from the one to the other. His point of departure is the existing Confession of faith; but before him there stands the "given" revelation in the Scriptures, "given" to him and to the Church. This revelation, however, is not "given" in a static manner; it is not a system of statements for man to take and use; rather is it something with which the Church has been entrusted, something for which we have to "search the Scriptures".
We now see more clearly a third danger which is connected with the idea of dogma. The dogma of the Church as a Con- fession of Faith is spiritual, pneumatic, a product of faith, whose authority is spiritual only. Even Church order, and order in the Church, is a spiritual matter. The Christian Church — as the body of believers — cannot tolerate any loophole in its structure by which the enemy of faith could enter. Thus, if the Church, by means of her discipline, expels from her body those who are not true members of the Church, in order that they shall not poison the Body corporate, so also must she deal with the teacher who teaches that which is harmful to the faith of the Church. Doctrinal discipline is a necessary form of Church discipline. This doctrinal discipline — which is exercised in every ordination vow, even of the simplest character — must, however, remain all the time aware of the limits to its exercise, due to the relative character of the authority of all ecclesiastical doctrinal norms. Alongside of the power to "bind" there must be room for freedom.
But in her effort to secure purity of doctrine the Church has not been content to use this spiritual method, but she has claimed the power of the State to achieve her end. The heretical teacher was not only the object of spiritual Church discipline, but was subject to police and judicial measures exercised by the State. The heretic was burnt, or he was hindered and punished in various ways in his natural and civic existence. Although since the time of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution the State has usually withdrawn from this sphere, yet the memory of mankind in the West has saddled the idea of dogma with recollections of these State sanctions of strict orthodoxy, and these memories are very tenacious; while the practice of certain Churches, which, wherever they have the
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opportunity, tend to recall this misuse of State authority, cannot fail to keep these memories alight.
The example of the Reformation Churches shows that this incursion from the spiritual into the political sphere is not only a tendency of the Roman Catholic understanding of dogma, but that again and again it slips into the Church, due to man's mistaken desire for security. To the extent in which the prestige of dogma grows does this danger become acute, although almost everywhere the Church now has to be content with very modified political and civil sanctions. This digression, which belongs rather to the sphere of Church history than to that of dogmatics, should not be regarded as wholly irrelevant where we are concerned to exhibit both the authority and the limits of dogma as the point of reference for dogmatics.
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CHAPTER 8
DOGMATICS AS A SCIENCE^
As soon as it has been recognized that dogmatics is quite different from a neutral religious study of the doctrine of any particular religion, as, for instance, of the Christian religion, as soon as we have understood that dogmatics has its own "place" within the life of the Church — that it is itself a mode of knowledge of faith, and that its aim is to formulate the doctrine of the Church, of the Divine revelation, in accordance with divine truth, then the question is bound to arise: Can dogmatics be regarded as a science ?
As a mode of Christian doctrine, as a function of the Church itself, dogmatics has primarily no interest in being called a "science". Its primary tendency is certainly not in the direction of intellectual research, but in the direction of the fellowship of faith and the preaching of the Church. The earliest theology of the Church betrays no "academic" aspirations of any kind. It is, therefore, really an open question whether dogmatics can have an interest in being called a "science" and in having to satisfy any kind of intellectual criteria.
When we turn to this subject we are not thinking of re- opening the discussion of the problem of "Religion and Science", at least, not in the sense in which this is usually understood: can faith be combined with the truths of science, or are not the statements of faith rendered questionable, or even mistaken by the discoveries of science? These questions have been thoroughly discussed in another connexion.^ The result of that critical examination was that it became clear that a conflict between religion and science could only arise, and has only arisen, out of a misunderstanding either on the part of religion or of science.
Our present question is a different one : namely, whether the service which dogmatics has to render to the Church obliges it to apply scientific criteria and methods, or, to put it in other terms, whether the very element which distinguishes dogmatics from faith does not make it necessary for dogmatics to enter into the realm of science {i.e. scientific criticism), and thus to use
' Wissenschaft has a much wider sense in Crerman than in English. The author's meaning comes out plainly in this chapter. (Tr.). = Offeiibayung mid \'cyuuiift, Chapters i8-i2.
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its criteria and its methods ? It would reveal a complete mis- understanding of faith were we to give an unhesitating affirma- tive answer to this question, by appealing to the argument that even theology is concerned with truth; but where truth is envisaged, there science must come into the picture. This brings out a very widespread, and very deeply rooted mis- understanding, which has done serious harm not only to theology but still more to faith and to the Church.
The Christian Faith itself is wholly directed towards Truth; but who would care to maintain that the true knowledge of faith is scientific knowledge! Science leads to truth of a quite definite kind; the truth of faith is of a wholly different order. The Christ who says "I am the Truth" certainly does not mean by this that He, as this Truth, is the Object of scientific know- ledge. The truth of faith, in the sense in which the Bible uses the term, is "truth as encounter", truth in the dimension of the person, "Thou-I", but not in the "thing"-dimension.i The truth which fuith perceives and grasps is a personal self- disclosure, the truth of revelation, not the truth which can be discovered by research and the use of the intellect.
At first sight, therefore, this contrast seems to suggest a negative answer to the question : Can dogmatics be regarded as a science ? And should it be thus regarded ? in spite of the title, hallowed by tradition, of Theo-logy, "divine science". Know- ledge of God, in the religious sense, is certainly not scientific knowledge, and the God of revelation is certainly not an object of scientific knowledge. In this respect Schleiermacher's protest against the scholastic conception and practice of a "divine science" was right, even though his conception of faith did not agree with that of the New Testament, nor did his own theory of faith agree with the Biblical doctrine, since his thought lacks the objective content of truth, the fact that the divine Self- revelation confronts us as objective ReaUty.
But we may grant that he is right in contending that dog- matics is distinguished from faith as the process of reflection is distinguished from all that is non-reflective and immediate. This "immediateness" of faith is certainly not the "pious feeling" of "absolute dependence", but the encounter of the human person — of that personal centre which the Bible calls the "heart" — with the Person of God, in His personal self- revelation in Jesus Christ. This revelation is the "Word of God", towards which faith is directed, which it grasps and by
' Cf. my book Wahrkeit als Begegnung, 1938. 61
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
which it is created. But theology, dogmatics, is not this faith itself — otherwise the theologian alone would be a true believer — but theology is faith in its reflection in critical thought. '
We have already made it clear that any Confession which becomes a "doctrine" is the fruit of a transition from the dimension of the "person" into that of a "thing", and indeed that it consists in this change. God, instead of being addressed, is spoken about; He is the object of doctrine. The further this process of refraction of immediacy goes the more impersonal does the truth become, the more does the knowledge of faith approximate to other forms of "secular" knowledge, the more impersonally objective and remote does it become. A further sign of theological reflection points in the same direction: the more that theological ideas become intellectual concepts, the more abstract do they become, the less do they resemble the vital concreteness of the Biblical way of teaching, especially that of Jesus Himself.
So far as this happens, however, the theological definition of ideas, and its ways of teaching, approaches that of the "scienti- fic" or "academic" teacher. It shares with that kind of teaching the effort to be accurate and precise, and strictly logical in the connexion of thought. The ideas are expounded clearly in definitions, and they lose that fluidity which suggests variety of meaning, akin to poetic speech, which is proper to the directness of the witness of faith. Its "edges" become sharp and hard, and in so doing its connexion can be presented in a rational manner; it is a building composed of stones which are well-hewn and can be fitted faultlessly together. The connexion becomes, or tries to become, a system; the historico- dynamic element becomes entangled in a net of timeless-logical conceptions. Above all, the personal categories are smothered by impersonal objective categories.
All this means that doctrine becomes, so to speak, capable of assuming scientific form. Whether this means that we ought to call dogmatics "scientific" or not is finally a question of terminology; is it not the case that even at the present day controversy still rages round the "scientific" character of philosophy? In any case dogmatics cannot become an inde- pendent "positive science", so long as it does not forget its origin and its aim, since it does not operate and represent a
' It must be because he does not recognize this distinction that Karl Earth, in his observations on "Dogmatics as a Science", ventures to say: "The fear of Scholasticism is the mark of the false prophet" (Kirchl. Dogm. I, i, p. 296).
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DOGMATICS AS A SCIENCE
given finite object, because all its efforts are directed towards the ultimate Truth behind all that exists. Its main concern is for that Truth which is not an "It", not a state of affairs, a situation, but absolute Subject, that Truth which cannot be known in cool detachment, but only in the obedience and confidence of faith.
In its relation to the Ultimate, the Absolute, which lies behind all that is given and actual, dogmatics is like philosophy. Its aim is not to establish facts, but to seek to discover the ultimate and final truth behind the facts, which is both the origin and the aim of all that is. In contrast to all philosophy, however, theology does not need to seek for this truth by its own efforts after knowledge ; its task is rather to illuminate by means of thought that revelation which is given to man through faith.
Like philosophy, it is concerned with the Eternal Logos, but in contrast to philosophy it is concerned with the Logos which became flesh ; therefore it is not concerned with a timeless and eternal Logos, but with one which has been revealed in history; it is not concerned with an abstract idea, but with the Logos who is the Son of the Father.
For all these reasons the "scientific" character of dogmatics, if we want to use this terminology at all, is sui generis; it can be compared with no other "science"; it must be measured by its own criteria, and it operates with its own methods, peculiar to itself, and unknown in any other science.
We should, of course, remind ourselves that, even apart from dogmatics or the "science of faith", science itself is not a unity, but a multiplicity of enterprises which take many forms, and represents a variety of sciences which cannot be reduced to any common denominator; this, indeed, comes out in the contrasts between natural science and "intellectual science", ^ the science of facts and the science of norms, causal science and the science of values, historical science and the science of law.- These differences between the sciences which exist outside the sphere of dogmatics provide, it is true, certain analogies for the difference between dogmatics and the other sciences, but they are very remote analogies, or parables, which break down at the decisive point.
From these considerations it has now become clear that the
I In English: "The Humanities" (Geisteswisscnschaft). (Tr.) * Cf. Rickert: Die Gremen der naiurwissenschajtiichen Begriffsbildun^ anU Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft.
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scientific character of dogmatics varies a good deal; we have also seen that the reason for this is the extent to which theo- logical reflection moves away from, or towards, the immediacy of faith itself. There is no doubt that the Epistle to the Romans is more "dogmatic", more reflective, than the Parables of Jesus. But who would maintain that this makes it a "scientific" work? It is well known that certain important works on dog- matics have grown out of catechisms, and the traces of their origin rather help than hinder their usefulness; who, however, can fix the point at which the non-"scientific" catechism becomes the quasi-scientific masterpiece of dogmatic theology ?i Here, too, we must be content with a proportional statement: the more that reflection, exact definition, strictly logical argument, reasoned classification, method and system pre- dominate in Christian doctrine, the more "scientific" it be- comes, and the further it moves from the original truth of faith from which it proceeds, and to which it must continually refer.
But how can this approximation to a "science" be of any service to faith which has no use for science? Must not the transformation, which, it cannot be disputed, takes place in the knowledge of faith, when, and to the extent, in which it moves into the medium of reflection, be felt as a direct loss for faith? If the explanations of ideas which dogmatics accomplishes, and the broad view which it attains through its systematic work, take place at the cost of the preservation of personal faith and the truth of faith — what, then, is the good of it? We have already answered this question, and indeed in three ways. Theological reflection, as we saw, is intended to serve the purpose of making a distinction between the valid and the genuine, and the non-valid and non-genuine (erroneous doc- trine) ; its aim is also to transcend the remoteness of the Biblical witness to revelation and to make this intelligible ("/oc« theologica" of the Bible); finally its aim is to bridge the gulf between secular and natural knowledge and the knowledge of faith (extended Baptismal instruction).
A parable may make the position clear. As the analytical chemist analyses in his retorts edibles which are offered for .sale in the market-place, and thus is able to distinguish that which has real food-value from all mere substitutes, yet in so
■ 'Ihc criterion which Barth proposes to enable us to distinguish "regular" from "irregular" dogmatics, that is, the effort to achieve "wholeness" {op. cit., p. z<)2), does not express the essential element which distinguishes a catechism from a work on Dogmatics.
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doing diverts the material intended for human nourishment from its actual purpose, and indeed even destroys it, and yet the result of all his methods of separation and examination serve the nourishment of the people as a whole, so that which the theologian clarifies, separates and re-unites, his dogmatic concepts and his systematic processes, are not the "food" that the believer needs, and not that which has to be preached, and yet it is serviceable to the preacher and the pastor. We do not preach — it is to be hoped — dogmatics, and yet what we learn through dogmatics enriches and deepens our preaching, a result which could hardly have been achieved without the study of dogmatics. Yet in order to understand aright the second and the third of the suggested functions of dogmatics, there is still one final aspect to be considered, which will form the content of the next chapter.
Before we do this, however, we must call attention to a secondary, but not unessential service of dogmatic reflection in respect of science. The Church, in the course of the centuries, has found out by experience that in its origins, and for many centuries in its preaching and its theology, it has not dis- tinguished, or has not made an adequate distinction between the cosmological material used by the primal knowledge of revelation — the "alphabet" of the Biblical witness to revelation — and the revelation itself. So the Church supported the ancient view of the world which the Bible contains with the authority of her witness to revelation, and she included all this within her message, until the contradiction of modern science, which was in the act of destroying this view of the world, made her aware of her error.
But a mighty effort of thought and intellectual labour was required to make the distinction between that view of the world and the witness of faith, and still more, in order to re- formulate the witness of the Bible in a new "alphabet", in terms which do not contradict the results of modern science. This process is still going on, and it seems possible that owing to the continual progress being made by the sciences, it will never cease. For this work of re-formulation, however, there is need of thinking which issues, it is true, from faith, and yet, at the same time, is able and willing to make the effort to know the scientific process, in order to understand it, and in some measure to stand above it and to take a larger view. A theo- logical teacher who speaks about Adam and the Fall in terms which it was right and natural for Augustine to use, leads the
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Church into the conflict between Rehgion and Science, which is as disastrous as it is unnecessary.
At the heart of the matter, in the witness to revelation itself, the Church never need be disturbed by the movement of secular rational science. Science always moves upon the surface dimension of secular knowledge, whereas faith is concerned with the dimension of depth, where we are concerned with Origin and Aim. But as the Biblical witness to revelation itself could not escape from the ancient ideas of the nature of the world then current, so the witness of revelation, at every period in human history, must use ideas concerning the world — whether they be cosmological or historical — which, if they are not to lead to that unfortunate conflict, must correspond with the modern scientific view of the world, or at least they must not contradict it. In this sense dogmatics is the mediator between secular science and the supernatural witness of faith. But at this point we have already reached the final aspect which I have just mentioned.
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CHAPTER 9
THE CONTEMPORARY CHARACTER OF DOGMATICS
The Christian Church stands and falls with the confession, "Jesus Christ, the same, yesterday, to-day, and for ever", and with the confession that the revelation and reconciliation which have taken place in Him, have taken place i(f> d-noc.^, once for all. To this extent doctrine is actually what the Roman Catholic Church loves to call it: Theologia perennis. At all periods of history, if faith be true and genuine, it makes itself "contemporary" with Jesus Christ, with His Cross and His Resurrection. Where revelation itself is concerned, there is no room for the ideas of "progress" and "evolution". The Christian Church cannot recognize any "progressive revelation". Neither the fact that we look backwards to the preparatory revelation of the Old Covenant, nor forwards to the Coming Kingdom and the Advent of the Lord, can be used to support that idea. The preparatory revelation, the prophetic one, culminated in the Incarnation of the Word, and therefore cannot be continued. But the Coming of the Kingdom, through the Parousia, is described as a final event, and is thus protected from all con- fusion with the idea of "progress".
There are no interim stages between the revelation which has taken place in the story of Jesus and that revelation of the End, when faith will pass into sight, "face to face". The situation of the Church, of the community of believers, in respect of their share in the truth of revelation, is, in principle, always the same — at all periods of history — and that means that the truth given to it is at all times, until the end of history, the same. If the idea of the theologia perennis, the unchangeableness of Christian doctrine and of the Christian Creed, means only this, then it belongs in point of fact to the fundamental ideas in the Confession of Faith. Whatever else may be altered, whatever else may be exposed to the law of historical relativity, this one element does not change, and is not relative.
And yet the Creed of the Church, theology, dogmatics, ceaselessly alters, and indeed not merely in the Protestant Churches, but — even though only secretly — even within the Catholic Church. Although there is a remarkable continuity of doctrine down the ages, and we still feel the theology of men like Irenaeus and Augustine, and still more of Luther, Zwingli
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and Calvin, to be so contemporary, so actual, so exemplary, that again and again we feel impelled to sit at the feet of these great masters as their eager disciples, yet we cannot ignore the fact that we think differently and teach differently from them and that we teach differently because we ought to do so, and we cannot avoid it. This brings out the decisive fact — which has already been sufficiently stressed — the fact that the Church is not identical with the revelation itself, although it is a form of revelation.
The fact that the doctrine of the Church is not the revelation itself comes out, as we have seen, in the New Testament witness to Christ Himself in the variety of the New Testament or apostolic doctrines. John speaks a different language from Paul; Paul uses different terms from Matthew. The content is one, but in each case the "setting" is different. And yet even in these writers we can already perceive that these varieties of "setting" are due to their intellectual and historical environ- ment. The statement is apt : "quidquid recipitur, modo recipientis recipitur" . That is the irrevocable law of appropriation, which, even where revelation is concerned, still has its own validity. Here, then, in the realm of faith, what are the "modus recipientis" and the changes which it introduces into the sphere of doctrine by the changes due to historical development ?
At first we might think that this fact — namely, that the doctrine is conditioned by the recipient — should refer only to one who does not yet believe ; for instance, to the way in which Paul the Missionary says of himself that "to the Jews he is a Jew" and to "them that are without law" (that is, the heathen) "as without law," in order that he "might save some".^ Undoubtedly this is a very important aspect of the problem, and at the same time it recognizes a very important task of the teaching Church.
As the Bible had to be translated by the missionary Church into the most widely differing languages, and as this translation work has been, and still is, one of the most important achieve- ments of the Mission of the Church, so the Gospel has to be continually re-translated into contemporary terms — a task which the Church ought to take far more seriously than she has done of late. But the problem which is involved in the indication of the "modus recipientis" is still more comprehensive, and goes a great deal deeper than merely "missionary translation".
We understand its depth only when we remember that faith is a definite experience of self-knowledge; that is, we learn
I I Cor. 9: 21.
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to understand ourselves in the light of God and His revelation. Even when confronted by the Word of God, man is not simply "tabula rasa" , not an empty page upon which God now writes His Word. Here, too, understanding is involved, which — like all understanding — makes use of the "apperceptions" of the human mind. And, moreover, what matters is not to understand "something", but oneself. Only where the Word of God or the revelation leads to a new understanding of oneself, does it become "one's own", in the act of believing understanding it is "appropriated". Thus even in the act of faith man is not just an empty vessel into which something is simply poured from the outside. The very act of faith itself is placed within a "setting" in which the ideas with which man understands anything at all, and with which above all he understands himself, are not eliminated but are utilized and remoulded.
But these ideas vary more or less at different times. Language changes, because ideas change, and the most profound change takes place where we are dealing with man's understanding of himself.^ The knowledge of faith is always involved in this "setting" which conditions our ideas, and in man's contem- porary view of himself. Even as Christian believers we are children of our own time; we cannot say merely that we "used to be", "before we became Christians". Certainly, if Jesus Christ really lays hold on us in faith, we are no longer children of our own day as we were before : Jesus Christ also changes this "being-children-of-our-time" in us; but He does not sweep it all away. Therefore even as Christian believers we use different language from the believers of other days; we say the same thing, but we express it differently. As preachers as well as theologians we use, unavoidably, other conceptions.
To name only one example of a theologian who is here a blameless witness, because he himself energetically repudiates the idea of a "point of contact": the idea of "Subject" plays a great part in the theology of Karl Barth — and indeed a very favourable part, and one which helps to clarify the problem! And yet this is an idea which, so far as I know, was never used by any previous theologian. It is a conception which springs from the Idealistic philosophy, from which Barth — like the rest of us — has learned some essential truths. Or again, what a necessary function is played by the idea of history in the dogmatics of the present day — once more, a conception which is practically wholly absent from the theology of older scholars.
' Cf. Bultman, Glauben und Verstehen, pp. 294, 312. 69
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The same is true of ideas such as person, responsibility, decision, community, act, etc.
Such ideas are necessary aids for the theologian, if he is to make plain to himself and his contemporaries that which in earlier days was intelligible in other terms, apart from these ideas. Conversely, ideas which our forefathers in the Faith used to express the truth we hold in common, must be freshly translated by us, and be replaced by others, in order to make clear what they meant. Thus the ideas of "substance", "person" (in the Trinitarian sense) and "nature" played an absolutely decisive part in ancient theology, but for us they are scarcely intelligible, or, if used without commentary, lead to gross misunderstanding. When we speak of the "Three Persons of the Trinity", it sounds really heterodox and polytheistic to us, yet the theologians of the Early Church did not mean it in this way. The same is true of the idea of the divine and human "Nature" of Jesus Christ. And such ideas have, as is well known, become absolutely essential parts of dogma !
Now we understand why there is such a great need for exposition of the Bible, and why "loci theologici" are necessary. Even the Bible makes use of a set of ideas — or rather of a mass of different sets of ideas from different periods — which are not intelligible to us at first sight. The work of Bible translation is not ended with that which usually goes by that name; it is continued in the exposition of the Bible, and is completed in the "loci theologici" of dogmatics. This means, therefore — ■ however daring this assertion may sound at first, still it cannot be assailed — Dogmatics is Bible translation; or, Dogmatics is the necessary preliminary work for that "Bible transla- tion" in which the true living preaching of the Gospel must consist.
The consideration of the truth of the "modus recipientis" also throws light on the third root of dogmatics : the extension of instruction for Baptism to thoughtful Christian believers. Why is it needful to go further than the elementary instruction given to catechumens? What do we mean when we say that among thoughtful Christian people there are questions which dogmatics ought to answer, so that the simple instruction contained in the Catechism leads to the Institutio religionis christianae ? What is there to ask where revelation is concerned ? Questions arise first of all because the "appropriation" has been only partially accomplished. The very scheme of question and answer in a catechism is designed to help the process of "appro-
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priation". Christian doctrine must not be simply "ingrafted",^ we must make it our own, and this means that it must be the answer to a question. Only that which answers our own questions can become our ozem. The more living and rich the mind which the Gospel encounters, the more questions does it arouse which must be answered if the Gospel is to be really made our own. But the questions vary with varying times, because their interests are different, and above all because man's view of himself is different at each period.
This is the cause of the demand for "contemporaneousness" in theology, which also implies the principle of "contempor- aneousness" as the criterion of sound, good, living theology. What is so often offered to us as "genuinely Biblical theology" is the very opposite: it is a stale lifeless theology, which is unable to make the Gospel intelligible in the language of the day; it is a theology which raises the suspicion that the faith behind it has not been truly appropriated — in any case, it is a theology whicji is unable to fulfil its task. These theologians would like most of all to use the "language of Canaan", that is, they would really prefer not to translate the Bible at all. They do not want to do so because they are unable to make the message of the Bible fully their own.
Certainly this demand for a "contemporary" presentation of Christian truth contains a danger — the danger of betrayal of the central concern of the Bible. This is the danger of every translation: "Toute traduction est une trahison" is a witty remark, but it has been put still more strongly in the phrase "traduttore — traditore" . But to give up translation means to abandon the effort to make the message our own ; even one who "knows Greek" translates; even one who teaches in the con- ceptions of Augustine's or Luther's or Calvin's dogmatics, translates — only he does not translate into his own language, but into the language of the fifth or the sixteenth century. We cannot get rid of the danger of translation by trying to evade it. But we must see the danger, and know how to meet it. This is accomplished— as is the case in "faithful" translation in the usual sense of the word — by continual reference to the "text", in order to see what it really says ; a good translator does this continually; he continually refers to the text, and then tries to give a "faithful" rendering. The ideas which serve the process of appropriation must remain subordinate to the subject which is the writer's main concern. When these ideas
' Rom. 6: 9. (Tr.) 71
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become independent, when they are erected into a system, into a form or a mould, into which the content of the Christian message is to be poured, there the Gospel has been violated. In modern times we have two particularly clear and warning examples : the freethinking theology, influenced in a speculative manner by Hegel, and the Ritschlian theology influenced by Kant and Lotze.^
Wherever dogmatics becomes a system, or is systematically dominated by a fundamental idea — no matter how Biblical it may be — then already there has been a fatal declension from the attitude of the faithful translator. The very thing that makes such an impression, and attracts people with good brains: rigid unity of thought, in dogmatics is the infallible sign of error. Revelation cannot be summed up in a system, not even in a dialectical one. A system always implies that the reason has forced ideas into a certain mould: it is the "imperial- ism" of an idea, even when this idea claims to be "Biblical". As faith means the destruction of human self-will, so also is it the destruction of human systems. Dogmatics as a system, even when it intends to be a system of revelation, is the dis- guised dominion of the rational element over faith.
This brings us to one final question.
■ The latest developments in Theology provide us with another example: the overshadowing of the Christian message by Heidegger's system of ideas in the theology of R. Bultmann, which yet in many ways has done so much to further this task of "translation".
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CHAPTER 10
FAITH AND THOUGHT IN DOGMATICS
Not only the study and interpretation of dogmatics, but even faith itself is a thinking process ; that is, it is thought determined by revelation, by the Word of God. This is usually forgotten when faith and thought are contrasted. Certainly, faith is not only a process of thinking, but as a central act of the person it is also willing and feeling. Faith, as the Apostle Paul puts it, is vvocKo-q TTLGTeois — the "obedience of faith".
But when man answers God's Word of revelation, he also accomplishes an act of thinking. Where there is speech, where there is an answer, there also is thought. That confession of Peter: "Verily Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God", is a thought which expresses itself as a meaningful, grammatical, logical sentence. Even faith is accomplished in ideas, and in connexion with ideas: God is the Lord, or — in the primary form — "Thou, O God, art my Lord".
To pray, to give God thanks, to praise God — all these are acts of thought, thoughts of the heart. Even faith has clearly connected ideas; it is not merely "pious feeling". Thus we cannot distinguish theology, or dogmatics, from faith, by saying that the one is a process of thought, while the other is not. It would not help matters much to say that faith "is thinking of a particular kind". We have indeed already seen (in the previous chapter) that faith as "appropriation" is accomplished through the use of the usual processes of thought, which again is manifested in language. Faith does not speak with celestial tongues, but with the words of ordinary speech: "Father", "Lord", "Word", "Life", "Light", "doing", "speaking", "hearing", "obeying", etc. Like the language of ordinary life, so also the thought of ordinary life is not superseded by faith, but it is utilized.
And yet without much consideration we know that in theology, in dogmatics, thinking plays a far greater part than in faith itself. A person who has little capacity for thinking can still believe; to make a life-work of theology and dogmatics presupposes a high degree of thinking power. The great theologian does not differ from the rest of the members of the Church by his greater faith, but by his greater powers of thought in the service of faith. The distinctive characteristic of the
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theologian within the Church is not that he is a believer, but that he is a thinker. Where, then, does the difference lie between the thinking of faith as such, and the believing thinking which theology, dogmatics, produces? This question is not put in the interests of psychology, but in that of the Church and of personal religion. We must be aware of this difference, on the one hand, in order not to make a false distinction between faith and thought, and, on the other hand, in order that we may not bind faith and dogmatics so closely together that it would seem as though the theologian alone were an adult, or mature Christian.
Up to this point we have been considering the difference caused by the transition from one dimension to another, as consisting mainly in the process of reflection which leads from "thought-in-encounter" to "thinking-about-it". But this still does not answer the question: "How is it, then, that through this transition the part played by thought becomes so much greater than it is in faith itself? We may, first of all, establish this difference in a negative manner: this process of turning to the "third person", and the impersonality which this engenders, means that the personal element, the "heart" — so long as the theological process of reflection goes on — is practically ruled out. Now we are engaged with the matter in thought, not in feeling and in will ; moreover the act of personal decision, which is the act of faith, lies behind us as a completed act. Thus reflection serves as a kind of eye-shade which prevents us from looking at anything we do not need to see. Dogmatic reflection is accomplished by a general process of abstracting all those elements which do not help us to understand the subject with which we are dealing as objectively and clearly as possible.
In positive terms this means: In the process of theological reflection the intellectual element in our faith is developed still further, and in isolation. The characteristic question which determines theological work is: "What does this mean}" Faith says: God is the Lord, or rather, "Thou, O God, art my Lord". Now from this prayer, which is a confession of faith, theological reflection abstracts the one element, the concept "Lord", and asks: "Now, what does this mean?" — not: "What art Thou saying to me, O God, here and now, in the very heart of my being?" — but: "What does this mean as a whole? What is the true content of this idea, 'God-Lord'?" The logical content of the statement, or rather the logical content of one element in this statement, is isolated, and made the object of reflection.
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We ought not to be horrified at this fact, however, as though it were something improper. Certainly, the Word of God is not given to us for this purpose; but in order that the doctrine of the Church about the Word of God should be sound, this abstracting process of thought must be accomplished, which in itself goes far beyond that which faith needs for clarity of thought. Actually, then, it is as we surmised it would be: The greater measure of intellectual labour, which distinguishes theology, dogmatics, from the simple thinking of faith, is conditioned by the process of reflection, by that transition into the objective, impersonal dimension which makes both this process of abstraction and the further analysis of the content of ideas possible.
This is the first step which throws light on our problem — but that is all. Now we know — dogmatics is the further develop- ment of the element of thought or of logic which is given with faith itself. This leads us to the further question: What, then, takes place in^ this further development? We may reply, perhaps, that "the idea is clarified" — or "the word 'Lord' is made more intelligible". In point of fact this is the meaning and purpose of this undertaking ; that should be plain by now. This illumination or clarification is indeed the meaning of all thinking. But the unsatisfactory point is this, that a content which does not come from our own thinking but from revelation is "clarified" by this very obviously human process, or at least can be thus illuminated. If this really were the situation, then within the sphere of the knowledge of faith we would have to be very suspicious of this whole proceeding, and of the validity and worth of its results. Now it cannot be denied that this kind of thought does take place in the thought-forms of ordinary, rational thinking, and, if we are to think at all, it cannot be otherwise. It is good to know this, and to remind ourselves of it frequently, in order that it may become evident how great — how immense — is the part played by the purely rational element, the logical power of thought in theological reflection or dogmatics. It is actually the purely human faculty of thought which qualifies the theologian for his work. The theologian ought to remind himself of this when he writes about the "sinful corruption of the human reason". Even if it is divine revelation about which he is thinking, still this process of reflection takes place by means of the natural human reason, with its concepts and thought-forms and its logical processes of proof,
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But dogmatics is not only a process of thought about that which is given in faith, it is at the same time believing thinking. The theologian is fully justified in protesting against the idea that his work is a purely rational consideration of the truths of faith — just as he certainly has no right to protest against the truth that rational thought plays a great part in his work. What, however, is added in theological thinking, that which differentiates this from all other kinds of thought, is the continual reference to the "subject" itself which is grasped by faith: a reference which, for its part, can only be accomplished in faith. The true theologian does not only think about the Faith and about the revelation given in faith, but in the very act of thinking he continually renews the act of faith; as a believing man he turns his attention to the revelation granted to faith.
Thus the act of thought in dogmatics may be compared with a movement which arises through the activity of two differently directed forces, for instance, one tangential and the other centripetal. The purely rational element of thought, logic, has the tendency to go straight forward from each given point; but faith continually prevents this straightforward movement by its pull towards the Centre. So instead of a movement in a straight line there arises a circular movement around the Centre — and that is a picture of real theological thinking. Theological thinking is a rational movement of thought, whose rational tendency at every point is continually being deflected, checked, or disturbed by faith. Where the rational element is not effective there is no movement of thought, no theology; where the rational element alone is at work, there arises a rational, speculative theology, which leads away from the truth of revelation. Only where faith and rationality are rightly interlocked can we have true theology, good dogmatics.
For this very reason systematic unity, and logic pushed to an extreme, in the absolute sense of the word, are a sign of a false tendency in theological work. Certainly there is no other way of thinking than one which is directed towards unity, and strives after logical sequence. But these two most essential marks of rationality would, if taken alone, make an end of theology as the consideration of revelation, just as to ignore them would make an end of thinking, even of theological thinking. Only the constant refraction of the systematic unity and the logical sequence by the direct relation of faith to the revelation itself, produces a way of thinking which may be
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described as "believing thinking", which produces dogmatics. The more exact analysis of the close interlocking of the act of thought with the act of faith in the thinking of the theologian, must, in so far as it is at all possible and necessary, be left to a special theological Theory of Knowledge.'
' Important beginnings of a theological epistemology of this kind may be found in Heim, Glaube und Denken; in Bultmann, Glanben und Verstehen; and in E. Burnier, Bible et theologie — especially in the chapters "Le caractere de la valeur epistemologique du temoignage biblique" and "La parole de Dieu et I'analogie de la foi".
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CHAPTER II
THE CONCEPT AND THE TASK OF DOGMATICS
We must now try to summarize all that we have been saying in our attempt to answer the question : What, then, is dogmatics ? And what is the service we should expect it to render?
Dogmatics is a particular form of Christian doctrine. As doctrine it is, like all doctrine, something prescribed for thought. Its aim is right thinking; its intention is that we should think along certain prescribed lines — and no other — about the sub- jects with which Christian doctrine deals. Because it is Christian doctrine, the virtual "subject" of dogmatics is the Church: this is what the Church teaches. Dogmatics, however, is not the only form of Christian doctrine. In the main, the primary teaching ministry of the Church is not exercised by the teaching of dogma. The Church teaches in her evangelistic work, in her preaching in the parish, in the teaching of young people, children and adults ; she teaches also in the exercise of pastoral work. But in all these other ways of teaching the doctrinal element is not emphasized to the same extent as in dogmatics, hence it does not predominate.
The teaching office of the Church is graded, from the exercise of her pastoral ministry and the act of preaching to the 'Tn- struction of Adult Candidates for Confirmation". Dogmatics is the next stage, and the final one. In it the doctrinal (or "teach- ing") element is central, and all the other elements, proper to other forms of Christian teaching — which may even be stressed more fully than the doctrinal element — are pushed out of sight. It is not the aim of dogmatics — as such, and directly — to convert, edify, warn, restore, nor even to help people to be better Christians. If dogmatics does effect any of these ends, this does not take place because it has been deliberately sought ; rather it is a by-product, even though it is not against the general intention.
The interest of dogmatics is wholly doctrinal, that is, it is concerned with right thinking. In order to be able to do this aright, dogmatics has to look away from much towards which otherwise the teaching of the Church is directed. It is, there- fore, so to speak, the logical function of the Church, with all the advantages and disadvantages of this specialization.
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This logical element — that is, the clear definition of the Church's teaching — is developed to a comparatively high state of completeness within the life of the Church; at least, if we may put it so, the Church aims at this perfect clarity and com- pleteness; above all, at a clarity of thought which will present Christian truth with the utmost clearness and comprehensive- ness, in the form of a well-knit system.
Like all Christian teaching, dogmatics is based upon revela- tion. In contrast to the other teaching activity of the Church, however, it is the task of dogmatics to make the basis of Chris- tian doctrine in the revelation itself the object of its teaching. One of its most essential characteristics, and most important criteria of its usefulness, is the fact that the basis of Christian doctrine, or doctrinal statements, is made plain in revelation, and that the specific authority which all Christian doctrine claims for itself is derived from this source alone. This is the meaning of that process of proof which has been exercised throughout the whole history of dogmatics: that of the "Proof from Holy Scripture".'
Even if this process has been discredited, on the one hand by its arbitrary character, and on the other by its verbal legalism, yet it does contain the right idea, namely, that there can be no other basis for Christian doctrine than that which comes from revelation, that it should seek no other argument for its basis than this, but that this basis in revelation determines the validity of each of its statements. To show the necessary con- nexion of Christian doctrine with this basis in revelation constitutes for dogmatics what in the other sciences would be regarded as logical proof, and the relation to the experience of reality.
Since, however, Christian doctrine, like all doctrine, develops by means of thinking, and the truth of revelation is related to the experience of reality, dogmatics, for its part, also uses those criteria and principles of secular science as secondary criteria and principles. Hence its statements must not only not contra- dict the truth of revelation, but also they must not contradict one another, nor must they be in contradiction to reahty; that is, they must not be of such a character that in order to affirm them, actual facts have to be denied or distorted.
Revelation, it is true, stands in opposition to human reality, just as the Divine Goodness is in opposition to the sinfulness of
' Cf. the observations of J. C. K. von Hofmann in the Introduction to his great work, Der Schriftbeweis , Vol. 1, pp. 3-32, which are still valuable.
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man. But where this sinful reality is mentioned from the stand- point of revelation, nothing is said about it that contradicts the experience of reality, but on the contrary, it is precisely this experienced and experiential reality which is disclosed in its opposition to the truth. The criterion of reality, therefore, like the logical one, applies also to Christian doctrine, and especially to dogmatics.
Dogmatics differs from the rest of Christian teaching in the fact that it presupposes this as something "given", and leans upon this "given" element as a support. Dogmatics presupposes the teaching Church — even apart from itself — it is therefore doctrine, which presupposes the teaching which is always going on, and has been going on in the past. It is, so to say, a secondary form of doctrine: it is teaching which defines the "true" doc- trine. It is accomplished as the basis and the criticism of Christian doctrine as a whole. It does this, however, only from a definite standpoint, proper to itself, and one which distin- guishes it from all the other teaching functions of the Church : namely, from the point of view of the true content of doctrine. It bases and examines the doctrinal content of the doctrine which is always being taught within the Church.
Hence, as its name suggests, it has a very close relation with the dogma of the Church, with the doctrinal confession of the Church, in which the Church gives an account — both to itself and to the world — of the content of its teaching. This close relation is twofold in character. On the one hand dogmatics presupposes dogma— the summary of the content of the doctrine of the Church in the form of a Confession — as that which is given to it, and as that which the Church wills to be understood as the norm of all its teaching, including its dogmatic teaching. In this sense the dogma, or the doctrinal confession of the Church, is not merely the starting-point and the material of dogmatics, but at the same time it is its norm. Since, however, this norm may always only be conceived by the Church as conditioned, and not as unconditioned, there falls to dogmatics a second task, namely, that of critically examining the dogma which the Church lays before it, and, when necessary, of providing a better dogma.
Dogmatics accomplishes this examination on the basis of that form of Christian doctrine, which is also the source and the norm of its teaching of every other form of Christian doctrine, on the basis of the original witness to revelation, namely, the doctrine of Scripture. Above all the teaching of the Church,
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even above all dogma or doctrinal confession, stands Holy Scripture. This is the source of revelation for the Church; for the Church knows the fact of revelation simply and solely through the Holy Scriptures. Scripture, however, is not only the source of all Christian doctrine, but it is also its norm, in so far as the original witness is the source of all the testimony of the Church. It owes this normative dignity and power to the fact that the original witness itself has a share in the primary his- torical revelation, in the history of revelation of Jesus Christ. But the norm of Scripture, too, understood as the doctrinal norm, is not unconditioned, but conditioned: namely, it is conditioned by that which also forms its basis: the revelation, Jesus Christ Himself.
As it is part of the task of dogma to clarify and examine the relation of teaching to dogma, to the Confession of Faith of the Church, so also it is part of its work to distinguish within the Scriptures themselves that which is binding and valid from that which is conditioned by human and contemporary circum- stances. The norm and the criteria of this distinction, however, are never acquired save from Scripture itself. Only from the Bible itself is it possible to perceive what is truly Biblical, only from revelation that which is truly in accordance with revela- tion. This is why it is impossible to apply the "Proof from Scripture" in its traditional legalistic form, which presupposes the infallibility of the actual Bible text.
Because dogmatics has a definite place within the Church it is necessarily confessional. By this we do not mean that morbid "ConfessionaUsm", which mistakenly sets up its own Con- fession as an absolute, without considering that every Church and every theology is only moving towards the goal, and has not yet attained it. Rather the genuinely confessional character of dogmatics signifies that each person who "thinks" in the service of the Church, is first of all under an obligation to the form of the Church, and the doctrine of the Church, through which he has received his own faith. A "confessional" attitude of this kind means thankfulness and loyalty towards those from whom we have received our faith. Hence the dogmatics which is here presented is consciously Reformed Church doc- trine. Its concern is to preserve and to emphasize the particular truth of the divine revelation which has been given to the Reformers, and among them, above all to Zwingli, Calvin, and their descendants.
This system of dogmatics, however, is under too profound an
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD
obligation to the absolute divine truth, to make this confes- sional loyalty into the decisive principle of a final court of appeal. It is not for us to reproduce the doctrine of Zwingli or of Calvin, but to seek the truth, and to give honour to the truth, even if this may lead us, at one point or another, to speak against Zwingli and Calvin, and for Luther, or even against the doctrine of the Reformers as a whole. In spite of confessional loyalty, we must retain freedom to learn from all the teachers of the Church, and to learn from all Churches. Thought that is in genuine harmony with the spirit of the Reformation cannot be "cabin'd, cribb'd, and confin'd" by "Confessionalism" as a principle.
On the other hand, dogmatics needs to be studied in the spacious setting of a truly "oecumenical" spirit, because know- ledge of divine truth is present in all Churches, and because every Church has had some special part of the knowledge of the truth given to it. Truly (ecumenical dogmatics, however, has no connexion with that cloudy "oecumenism" which tries to distil an extract from all the Creeds which will not contradict any of them. Just as we must not confuse the truly "Confessional" point of view with "Confessionalism", so that which is truly "oecumenical" must not be confused with a supra-confessional eclecticism. In the last resort we are not concerned with this or that ecclesiastical confession, neither Reformed nor Lutheran, nor with any other, but solely with the truth which has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
To find this, the different confessions may do us good service: the one which is our own, that of the Reformed Churches first of all, and after that the others; but we are not bound to any one of them. We seek the Truth alone, and not any agreed ecclesiastical formula, whether it be offered us by our own, or by one of the other Confessions, or by none of them. Above all, the dogmatics which is under an obligation to the Truth alone must guard against all national or continental regionalism, for which the European or the English or the American point of view would be more important than to be in the Truth.
The service which dogmatics, as the "logical function of the teaching Church", has to render is twofold: clarification and translation. Dogmatics cannot "make disciples";' it can only serve the Church — whose work it is to make disciples through its teaching — by the clarification of the ideas with which it works, by teaching her to distinguish the false from the true,
' Matt. 28: ly. 82
THE CONCEPT AND THE TASK OF DOGMATICS
the half-true from the true understanding of the Gospel. And it can help individual believers in their faith by answering the questions which the doctrine of the Church raises in their minds. The fact that in order to do this the Church must give a far more abstract form to her teaching than is and should be the case in the practical teaching activity of the Church, consti- tutes, it is true, a danger; but it should be no hindrance. The more plainly we see the distinctive character of dogmatic, as compared with the practical teaching activity of the Church, carried on by preaching, catechetical instruction, and in the "cure of souls", the less danger will there be; conversely, where this distinction is ignored, where the teaching activity of the Church is practically equated with dogmatics, there the danger of a sterile intellectualism may become a real danger to the life of the Church.
The second service dogmatics can render is that of "Bible translation". As the exegete continues the work of the trans- lator, by paraphrasing the translated text, and thus bringing it nearer to the understanding, so the dogmatic theologian con- tinues the labours of the exegete by a kind of "collective paraphrase of the Bible". He must venture to listen to that which Isaiah, Matthew and John say, and put it together, in order to discern the Word of God behind the words of the Apostles. Thus he must venture to understand the Word spoken so long ago as a contemporary word ; for it is only as a word for our own day that it can be understood, and made intelligible. Through this "collective paraphrase of the Bible" the dogmatic theologian serves the expositor of the Bible, as he first of all has learned from the expositor of the Bible, and has received from him, hence he also renders a service to the preacher and pastor, who in order to speak intelligibly must not speak in the language of Isaiah or of Paul, but in the language of the present day. The transference of the Word of the Bible into the thought-categories of our own day — that is the only possibility of real appropriation. The theologian's understand- ing of the Bible comes out — paradoxically — in the very fact that he does not use the language of the Bible.
This "translation" work of dogmatics can easily lead to error, if the dogmatic theologian does not thoroughly understand the thought of his own day. That is why the task of dogmatics presupposes that of "apologetics", the discussion with the ideologies and substitutes for faith of his own day. Only one who has wrestled with the mind of his own day, and who knows
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the opposition between Biblical and "modern" thought, is in a position to make Biblical doctrine intelligible to the man of the present day, without compromising with modern thought. The dogmatic theologian must walk along the narrow knife- edge between two precipices: the wrong "offence" of being unintelHgible, of teaching a doctrine which does not "fit", on the one hand, and the avoidance of the genuine "Offence" of the Cross on the other.
Dogmatics, therefore, is doctrine based upon the divine revelation, thus upon absolute Truth. Hence it shares the claim of the Word of God to be absolute. This claim is neither foolish nor arrogant, because this Truth has not been created by man. All Christian doctrine, including dogmatics, is "speak- ing the divine Word after Him". But this "speaking", since it is human, also shares in the relativity of all that is human. "We have this treasure in earthen vessels", ' our knowledge is partial. 2 Only a system of dogmatics which is always aware of both these facts can render its service aright. If it forgets the first, then it becomes an individualistic "religious conception", which is without authority; if it forgets the second, then it becomes guilty of idolizing human forms of thought. Thus as reflexion upon the Word of God, given to faith, it has a twofold relative element.
As reflexion, as the thinking of a believer about the content of faith, as the specialized logical function of the Church, dogmatics is, however, also, over against the believing existence as a whole, an abstraction, something which has been "split off". There is no such thing as "theological existence"; there is only theological thinking and believing existence. While a man thinks as a dogmatic theologian, as in every other act of re- flexion, he stands outside the active, "Thou-related" reality, even though it may be true that only a person who belongs to the Christian Church can be a good theologian, and therefore, in reality, stands in that twofold relationship with the "Thou", which is called faith in God, and love to our neighbour. In the act of thought, the theologian does not "live" in this vital reality, but he "reflects upon it". Hence it is possible to be a good theologian but a bad Christian, since it is only the logical side, the "thinking" aspect of faith, which has been fully developed, while the other, that of the personal relation to God and our neighbour remains "under-nourished". This is not
' 2 Cor. 4:7. ^ I Cor. 13: 9.
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inevitable ; it ought not to be so ; but unfortunately it frequently is so.
The remembrance of this always fatal possibility, and of the fact that again and again this possibility becomes a fact, must make the theologian humble. For one who is intellectually gifted, it is so much easier to be a Christian in the sphere of thought than in that of practical behaviour; and yet the good theologian knows very well that what counts before God is not merely what one thinks, but what one thinks with such faith that it becomes act. For only that faith counts "which worketh through love ".I
Thus in two directions we see the limitations of dogmatics. It is not the mistress, but the servant of faith and of the com- munity of believers ; and its service is no less, but also no more, than the service of thought to faith. Its high dignity consists in the fact that it is a service to the highest final truth, to that truth which is the same as true love, and it is this which gives it the highest place in the realm of thought. But the fact that it is no more than this service of thought — which, as such, does not maintain that love and loyalty which must be expected from the Christian, is its limitation; a dogmatic which is aware <