My Little Barth Project: CD I.1 Finished!

The week was bad but the weekend was good; Sunday afternoon I finished the first volume/part of Barth's Church Dogmatics in English. (I recorded my first impressions here; I've not done much with Romans since and might abandon it.) This volume introduces Barth's understanding of the Word of God and the Trinity; in this post I focus on the latter.

This was more familiar territory for me; there was less philosophy (yuck) and more straight Bible and theology, both systematic and historical, so I was able to progress much faster. I enjoy reading about the Trinity. It is an important issue but also one about which some are entirely too pedantic. I appreciate that while Barth affirmed all the classical formulation, specifically the Ni-Con Creed, he also acknowledged how inadequate our language and expressions are for the task.

I detected nothing heretical in his presentation. Barth eschews modalism and subordinationism, Ebionism and docetism. He prefers to refer to the "persons" of the Trinity as "modes of being" (Seinsweise), which I'm fine with for two reasons. First, the problems of the Latin term persona are well known. Second, as long as Sabellianism is consciously and continuously repudiated, discussion of "modes" is a fruitful line of thought for expression of Trinitarian dogma. We students need to hear both Barth and Moltmann, in the end most likely taking a comfortable place between the two. (For more on this, see I. Taylor, "In Defence of Karl Barth's Doctrine of the Trinity," International Journal of Systematic Theology, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 2003.)

Barth fully embraces the filioque, which was not surprising in the least. Not a few recent protestant theologians have begun to question it.

One nice thing reading this was confirmation of some of thoughts on the Trinity and theology I had worked out on my own.

I didn't copy many lengthy quotes from this section in my notes, but here are a couple I liked:

For the feminists: "When Scripture calls God our Father it adopts an analogy only to transcend it at once.... It is from God's fatherhood that our natural human fatherhood acquires any meaning and dignity it has." (p. 398)

For the Calvinists: "Even and especially the child of God in the New Testament sense will never for a moment or in any regard cease to confess: 'I believe that I cannot of my own reason or power believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him.'" (p. 465)

For the conservatives: "Modernist Protestantism in its entirety has simply been a regression to pre-Nicene obscurities and ambiguities regarding the Spirit." (p. 468)

Up next is part two of volume one, the conclusion of his "Doctrine of the Word of God." At 900 page, this second part is nearly double the size of the first. Sitting on my desk right now, it looks very intimidating, but I look forward to getting into it as it is in this volume that Barth lays out his doctrine of Scripture.

What I have enjoyed most about reading Barth thus far is what initially pulled me into the study of systematic theology to begin with: its ability to sweep you out of the secular into the presence of the holy. Reading theology should be a spiritual experience, and Barth's certainly is. Rather than taxing and tiring, it is refreshing and reviving and edifying to both the spirit and the mind.