Church Dogmatics First Appeared
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EDITORS' PREFACE IT was in 1936 that Professor Thomson's translation of this half-volume of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics first appeared. In introducing this new translation, our first word must be one of deep gratitude for what he did. It is only now in the completion of the English edition of the Church Dogmatics that we are able properly to appreciate the arduous intellectual as well as linguistic work he had to put in, at that early stage, in breaking into Barth's thought and finding a way of giving it intelligible articulation in English. Without his pioneering work the translation of the succeeding volumes would have been much more difficult and rather less successful. Meantime some 14,000 copies of Thomson's translation have been printed, and their distribution all over the world, not only in English-speaking countries, has done yeoman service in introducing many generations of students and readers to the work which more than any other has changed the direction of the history of theology. The fact that the continued demand for this, and the subsequent volumes, in English, does not abate, belies the ever-recurring rumours (evidently spread by wishful thinking reactionaries!) that Barth's influence is on the wane, and argues rather that modern theology is aware that, far from by-passing Barth, or even passing through him, it has yet to catch up on him. This increasing interest in Barth's dogmatics is also apparent in the persistent demand for a fresh translation of this half-volume, made in the light of the rest and making the English edition of the Church Dogmatics uniform throughout. Now that it has been completed the Index Volume will follow shortly. Readers are referred to the Editors' Preface to Church Dogmatics I, 2, for some indication of the difficulties that are posed for translation into English by Barth's characteristic forms of thought as well as by his distinctive German style. Several points of special relevance to this work, however, may be mentioned here. In his discussion of the scientific character of dogmatics, Barth's language clearly reflects the logic and philosophy of science which he encountered in the 1920s, not least through his friend Heinrich Scholz whom he invited to join him in the crucial seminars he held in Bonn in 1930 for the elucidation of the theological method of St. Anselm. His use of technical terms, however, was distinctive, in line with his refusal to divorce form from material content, and his determination to develop the scientific character of dogmatics on its own proper ground. Care has been taken to render his thought as accurately as possible in English, but readers are warned not to interpret his terms (e.g. “analytic”) simply out of their knowledge of current linguistic philosophy but to look to their actual use. It may help to note that Barth reacted strongly against the nominalist and conventionalist tendencies of this philosophy even as represented by Heinrich Scholz himself. Two terms in particular have given us a lot of thought, Gegenstand and Seinsweise. Quite often the best English rendering of Gegenstand would be “subject” rather than “object,” but since this lays itself open again and again to serious ambiguity in English, we have kept consistently to the rendering “object,” while making it evident that this cannot be taken in an “objectifying” sense. In regard to Seinsweise Karl Barth himself once agreed with us that “way of being” might be a better rendering in English than “mode of being,” if only to avoid any hint of “modalism,” which he completely rejects. Yet his intention here to refer back to the Cappadocian ß and the modus entis of Protestant Orthodoxy made it evident that it would be best to preserve the rendering “mode of being” adopted by Thomson. In any case, “way of being” appears in some contexts to detract from Barth's determination to move behind an “economic” to an “immanent” (i.e. an ontological) Trinity. The lasting significance of this work can be indicated briefly by drawing attention to two of its main features. (1) In it Barth seeks to ground theology as rigorously as possible upon the mutual relation of God and man actualised by divine grace in the being of the Church. At the same time his intention is both to deliver theology from its persistent tendency to become reduced to some form of anthropology, and also to establish the freedom and rationality of the human subject in the creative address of God through his Word. Much of the small print in the Introduction and in the first chapter represents Barth's attempt to establish this position through arguments on two fronts, with Modernistic Protestantism and with Mediaeval Roman Catholicism, each of which, he claims, in its own way wrongly subordinates the knowledge of God to an antecedent and independently grounded system of thought. (2) In it Barth seeks to direct modern theology back to its patristic foundations in the dogma of the Holy Trinity, and to show that the root of the Church's understanding of the Trinity of God is to be found in God's revelation of Himself as the Lord. He consistently attacks the split that developed in Roman Catholic and Protestant theology alike between the being and the activity of God, whether in creation or in redemption, which led to the fatal rift in the basic concept of God evident both in the division between an independent natural theology and revealed theology and also in the separation between the treatise on the one God and the treatise on the Triune God. Far from being a mere inference or a deduction from a “more basic” position, the doctrine of the Trinity itself belongs to the very basis of the Christian faith and constitutes the fundamental grammar of dogmatic theology. At this point at least, Karl Barth has been followed by some of the most eminent dogmatic theologians, not least in the Roman Catholic Church. In introducing his translation of this work Professor G. T. Thomson claimed that it was “undoubtedly the greatest treatise on the Trinity since the Reformation,” but when it is studied in connexion with volume two on the doctrine of God, the claim may well be made that it is the greatest treatise of the kind since the De Trinitate of St. Augustine. The Editors wish to express their thanks to Mr. Richard H. Roberts, of New College, Edinburgh, in assisting them with the proofs, and above all to the Publishers and the Printers for their continued patience and courtesy in making this new edition available in English. Pasadena and Edinburgh, Trinity 1973. PREFACE HUMAN affairs—even those over which we think we have some control—often take a different course from the one planned. Hominum confusione? Dei providentia? No doubt the latter too and decisively, and yet in such a way that on the human side everything is primarily and per se confusio, many plans being not carried out at all, or carried out in a way which is very different from that envisaged. When five years ago I published The Doctrine of the Word of God as the first volume of a Christian Dogmatics in Outline, I had many serviceable materials to hand and thought that I should and could finish the promised whole within the time which has now elapsed. Things turned out differently. When the first volume was before me in print, it showed me plainly—whatever may be the experience of others, much more plainly than a manuscript lying in a cupboard could ever have done—how much I myself have still to learn both historically and materially. The opposition which it encountered at least amongst colleagues was too general and vehement, the intervening changes in the theological, ecclesiastical and general situation gave me so much to think about, and the need for my little work on Anselm of Canterbury was so pressing, that I could not pay any attention to the gradually increasing chorus of friendly or ironical enquiries as to what had happened to the second volume, nor even think of continuing on the level and in the strain of the initial volume of 1927. This first became clear to me, of course, when the four thousand copies of the first edition of what had been published as the first volume began to run out, and I was faced with the task of preparing a second edition. My experience of twelve years ago in re-editing the Römerbrief was repeated. I could still say what I had said. I wished to do so. But I could not do it in the same way. What option had I but to begin again at the beginning, saying the same thing, but in a very different way? Hence I must gratify or perhaps in part annoy my readers by giving them a revision of the old book instead of the expected new one. May some at least believe that from my own standpoint at any rate this change of plan has been forced on me by the pressure of outer and inner necessities! And may it be clear to some at least that there are good reasons for this unusual arrest or change of direction! The alteration which I have made consists first and formally in the fact that I have thought it good to make my exposition much more explicit. This emerges at once in the relationship between the size of the book and the material covered. The book is much larger, and it has been severely compressed in places, but it covers only half the material treated in the first edition, and is thus only a half-volume.