Religion: Witness to an Ancient Truth

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known through a specific revelation of himself. Therefore Barth does not try to "prove" the existence of God in his Dogmatics; he starts with the reality of the God of revelation.

To Barth, theology cannot be free speculation ; it is correct only when it is obedient to what God says. Hence there can be no theology apart from prayer, and no theology apart from God's revelation. The revelation of God is a continuous act: God still speaks to man through the words preached by his church to those who accept Christ. Since this revelation continues within the body of those who witness to God, there can be no theology apart from the church and what it believes. Barth, of course, is appalled at the divisions of Christendom; yet he thinks that most of those differences are the result not of heresies but of "particular errors"in doctrine. Barth's dogmatic theology, which freely ranges across denominational lines despite its basic Calvinist orientation, seeks to correct those errors by analyzing doctrinal interpretations in the light of what the Bible says.

The Divine Address. Barth accepts and welcomes scholarly criticism of the Bible, even when it shows the Scriptures to be full of errors and inconsistencies. He does not consider the Bible infallible, and he deplores orthodox Protestants who make it into "a paper Pope." Nevertheless, the Bible testifies to God's Word, which is revealed to man through human speech. The words that the Biblical writers use may not always be the appropriate ones, but they must be accepted as words elected by God. There can be, in Barth's view, no question of "disproving" the authority of the Scriptures, for the church today must take the "risk" of accepting the witness of the early Christians who established the canon of the Scriptures, and the Reformation fathers who revised it. God still speaks within the Bible; in the light of faith, the church and her theologians must listen and undertake the ever-unfinished task of finding out what He is saying.

The decisive center of the Bible is its witness of Jesus Christ—the Son who became man, and by the humiliation of his death reconciled the sinful created world to the father. For Barth the Word of God came to man in the person of Christ, and Dogmatics is a Christocentric exploration of that word. Since Christ is man's only contact with God, Barth hammers every article of Christian faith into a firm relationship to Christ himself. He defines creation, for example, as the establishment of a place where grace would operate, and argues that God's creation of the universe cannot be considered apart from Christ's redemption of it.

A Joyful Message. This emphasis upon the awesome mystery of the Redemption makes Dogmatics, for all its forbidding size, a joyful and optimistic work. By Christ's reconciling act. Barth says, the Kingdom of God has already been established, although it is held out to man as a promise rather than a visible reality. Man, in Luther's phrase, is simultinstus accpeccator (simultaneously righteous and sinful). He is still besieged by evil and capable of sin himself, but he also knows that Christ has already conquered the forces of darkness, and that in St. Paul's words "death hath no more dominion over him." Says Yale's Theologian Frei: "What emerges from