Barth's Dogmatics, §7, The Word of God, Dogma and Dogmatics

In this ongoing project, I am taking brief notes on Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. My folks
purchased the whole English-language set for me forty years ago, and subsequently I wrote my doctoral dissertation on a portion of Vol. III, part 2. See my December 2, 2018 post for Barth's overall plan for his series.

Paragraph 7 of the Dogmatics (pp. 248-292) is “The Knowability of the Word of God.” Barth’s summary is: "Dogmatics is the critical question about dogma, i.e., about the Word of God in Church proclamation, or, concretely, about the agreement of the Church proclamation done and to be done by [humans] with the revelation attested in Holy Scripture Prolegomena to dogmatics as an understanding of its epistemological path must therefore consist in an exposition of the three forms of the Word of God as revealed, written, and preached" (248).

This paragraph concludes Chapter 1 (The Word of God as the Criterion for Dogmatics) of Church Dogmatics. 

In his book An Introduction to Barth’s Dogmatics for Preachers (Westminster Press, 1963), Arnold B. Come writes of this and the previous paragraph: "It is, of course, [human beings] who hear and know God. But the capacity is not to have or to hold God's Word but to acknowledge him. And this capacity is given [us] in the event. God's acknowledgment of [us] empowers [us] to acknowledge him. 'The possibility of the knowledge of the Word of God lies in the Word of God and nowhere else... This miracle is faith.' (I-1, 255.) It is a product not of a prior likeness between God and [us] but of the free event in which God chooses and establishes [human being] as an 'I' in relation to his own 'Thou.' [Our] acknowledgment is always incomplete and imperfect. It is the task of dogmatics to test [our] acknowledgment against God's acknowledgment. This means to listen to the Trinitarian God. To listen to him means to listen to the Bible against all human philosophies and sciences, even against all the deliverances of the church (¶ 6, 7.) (90).

Section 1, "The Problem of Dogmatics," is sharply critical of Modernist Protestantism as well as Roman Catholicism--the former, because it focuses the norm of faith, and the latter, because it focuses upon the development of truths through the church's teaching office. Both, he believes, overlook "the will of God whose acknowledgment or non-acknowledgment in the Church's proclamation is something that should truly unsettle the whole church" (p. 274). Dogmatics must be pursued out of obedience.

In section 2, "Dogmatics as a Science," Barth describes scientific dogmatics as inquiring "into the agreement of Church proclamation with the revelation which is attested in Holy Scripture. This is what we called the meaning and point of dogma in the first sub-section" (p. 283).

Finally, in section 3, "The Problem of Dogmatic Prolegomena," Barth turns to the task ahead: dogmatics "would e left strangely in the air if finally and supremely the Word of God itself and as such were not also raised again in a completely new way" (p. 289). The correspondence between the Word of God as scripture and as proclamation--the fact that "God reveals Himself" (p. 291) will continue to be investigated in the sections ahead.