Church Dogmatics, Vol. 1.2, Sections 22-24: The Doctrine of the Word of God, Study Edition 6 [6, 1 ed.] 0567393844 / 978-0567393845

Table of contents :
§ 22. The Mission of the Church / 1. The Word of God and the Word of Man in Christian Preaching / 2. Pure Doctrine as the Problem of Dogmatics / 3. Dogmatics as Ethics / § 23. Dogmatics as a Function of the Hearing Church / 1. The Formal Task of Dogmatics / 2. The Dogmatic Norm / § 24. Dogmatics as a Function of the Teaching Church / 1. The Material Task of Dogmatics / 2. The Dogmatic Method

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KARL BARTH CHURCH

DOGMATICS

VOLUME

I

THE DOCTRINE OF THE WORD

THE PROCLAMATION

OF GOD

OF THE CHURCH

EDITED BY

G. W. BROMILEY T. F. TORRANCE

.\\

t&t

clark

Translated Published

by G. W. Bromiley, G. T. Thomson,

Harold

Knight

by T&T Clark

A Continuum Imprint The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SEI 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com

Copyright

@

T&T Clark, 2009

Authorised translation of Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik I Copyright @ Theologischer ~erlag Zurich, 1932-1938 All revisions to the original English translation and all translations @

Princeton

Theological

Seminary,

of Greek, Latin and French

2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Typeset by Interactive Sciences Ltd, Gloucester Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by MPG Books Group

ISBN 10: 0567135527 ISBN 13: 9780567135520

CONTENTS S22-24

S

22. THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH

The Word of God and the Word of Man in Christian Preaching Pure Doctrine as the Problem of Dogmatics . 3. Dogmatics as Ethics

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23.

1.

1

2.

16

DOGMATICS AS A FUNCTION OF THE HEARING CHURCH 1.

2.

S

24.

39

The Formal Task of Dogmatics The Dogmatic Norm

54

70

DOGMATICS AS A FUNCTION OF THE TEACHING CHURCH 1.

2.

The Material Task of Dogmatics The Dogmatic Method .

v

101 109

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THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH The Word of God is God Himself in the proclamation of the Church of Jesus Christ. In so far as God gives the Church the commission to speak about Him, and the Church discharges this commission, it is God Himself who declares His revelation in His witnesses. The proclamation of the Church is pure doctrine when the human word spoken in it in confirmation of the biblical witness to revelation offers and creates obedience to the Word of God. Because this is its essential character, function and duty, the word of the Church preacher is the special and immediate object of dogmatic activity.

1.

THE WORD OF GOD AND THE WORD OF MAN IN CHRISTIAN PREACHING

We have reached the final and really critical point in the doctrine of the Word of God, that which is both its starting-point and its end: the Word of God as the preaching of the Church. Must the same serious meaning be attributed to this as to the first two aspects, "The Word as God's revelation" and "The Word as Holy Scripture"? Must this third aspect, the preaching of the Church in the whole sphere of humanity in which it is actualised here and now, be included in the indirect identity between revelation and Scripture? Is the Church's preaching also God's Word, and to what extent? Is God's Word also the preaching of the Church, and if so to what extent? The task of theology and of dogmatics in particular consists in the attempt to answer this question. For the sake of this question, so vital for the life of the Church, it was necessary first to ask about the Word of God as revelation and the Word of God as Holy Scripture. In face of these questions, we now have to establish conclusively the task and limitation of dogmatics. Again, we must begin by stating the problem involved. What we have to say should first be related to the results attained in the previous chapter on Holy Scripture. The existence of Holy Scripture means that as the Word of God has been spoken once for all in His revelation inJesus Christ through the Holy Ghost, it is not only distant from, but also near the Church, in the witness of the prophets and apostles. It does not only confront it, but is given to it; and it is given to it, not only as something perpetually alien, but as its own commission and authority. In the form of Holy Scripture it has and retains its own incomparable authority and freedom, which is as superior to all human authority and freedom as the heavens are higher than the earth.

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22.

The Mission of the Church

But in the same form, it becomes the foundation in the Church of the human authority and freedom that is legitimate and necessary. In the human authority and freedom thus founded by it and in it, it becomes the object of the Church's preaching, and men, who as such are identical neither with jesus Christ nor with the prophets and apostles, become indirectly and by faith (upon the sole ground that they are baptised members of the Church and therefore participants in its commission and its authority) the hearers and speakers of the Word of God as it becomes a word spoken by them in the form of their human word. We know that in Holy Scripture the Word of God is the Word of God in a different but no less real sense than it is in revelation. The same is true of the witness of the prophets and apostles as compared with the original witness of the Son of God Himself. However sharply the difference between the Lord and the servants must be stressed, the very solemnity of this relationship, founded and formed as it is by the resurrection of jesus, forbids us to entertain the notion that, with the transference of the Word of God to its biblical witnesses and the self-communication of jesus Christ to His followers, anything in the nature of a weakening or dilution, or even a disturbance or distortion of the Word of God has taken place. The same thing is fundamentally true of the relationship of Holy Scripture with revelation on the one hand, and with the preaching of the Church on the other. Once again in a different form, but here too neither diminished nor weakened, we have to do really and truly with the one integral Word of God, with God Himself, with jesus Christ through the Holy Ghost, just as certainly as Holy Scripture, and in and through it God's self-revelation, is given to the Church. In this case the Word of God is preached only indirectly, formally and relatively in the authority and freedom of jesus Christ Himself and the authority and freedom of the prophets and apostles, that is, in the authority and freedom accorded to the Church as instituted under the Word and assembled by the Word. But this does not alter in the very least the fact that in this case, too, it is really and truly the one integral Word of God to be believed as such by those who speak and those who hear it. The Church exists as the earthly body of the heavenly Lord and as the community built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets; and the connexion between these two things is not torn by the subordination of the first witnesses to Him of whom they bear witness, nor again by the subordination of those who receive this witness to those from whom they receive it. On the contrary, .in the very fact of this hierarchy consists the strength of the connecting link by which the Church is held together as a single whole, from jesus Christ at the right hand of the Father down to the humblest of those who by the word ofRis witnesses have been called to faith. But this connecting link consists in the one Word of God, which in these three different forms, in none of them less than in the others, in none of them diminished and weakened, but in all three remaining the selfsame Word, constitutes the life and the foundation of the Church. Otherwise how can it be true that in Jesus Christ this Word became incarnate once and for all? How can it be true that the prophets 2

1.

The Word of God and the Word of Man in Christian Preaching

and apostles appointed and equipped by Him have spoken by His Spirit and still speak? If it is true that the Son of God has come in the flesh and has risen in the flesh and that Holy Scripture as the witness of God's revelation is God's Word for the Church, the Church certainly has to be reminded of the fact that the Word is conveyed and given to it only by revelation and its biblical witness. But in this reminder there must be no reduction in the validity or completeness of this mediation and gift; nor must we throw any doubt on the obligation and comfort of realising that in the preaching of the Church as well we have to do with the Word of God in an undiminished meaning of the term and therefore with God Himself. The real problem of God's Word as the preaching of the Church or the preaching of the Church as God's Word can be raised only within the limits of the question put to us by the answer which God has already provided. When we are confronted by the Word of God addressed to the Church as revelation and as Holy Scripture, and therefore giving it its commission and authority, we may well be astonished and terrified, and ask ourselves: Is this so, and how far is it so, and what is going to happen in consequence of the fact that the Church has received this task, and that in and with its fulfilmen t of this task, God Himself in His Word is involved, and God Himself proclaims His revelation through His witnesses? But if this question is to be meaningful and practical, we can address it only to ourselves. We cannot address it to God, as though He had not spoken to us in His revelation and His witnesses. Again, as a question addressed to ourselves, we can answer it meaningfully and practically only by listening to God's Word, and not out of the resources of our own insights. The real problem raised by this question cannot burst the framework within which the Church exists; nor can it go back behind the decision already made in the glory of the Word of God concerning the Church, and concerning the presence and action of the Word of God in the Church. This decision cannot be disputed. It cannot be treated as the goal of our inquiry. It necessarily has to be treated as its presupposition. Therefore, to state the problem, we must begin with the affirmation that, by the grace of revelation and its witness, God commits Himself with His eternal Word to the preaching of the Christian Church in such a way that this preaching is not merely a proclamation of human ideas and convictions, but, like the existence of Jesus Christ Himself, like the testimony of the prophets and apostles on which it is founded and by which it lives, it is God's own proclamation. That it is men who speak here, men who are not themselves Jesus Christ or even prophets and apostles, does not in any way permit them, in an affirmation and assertion of their humanity, arrogantly to try to say something other than the Word of God. On the other hand, it does not permit them to be fainthearted, as though in their humanity they were not able to speak the Word of God, but only their own human words. Again, it does not permit those who hear them, because of the humanity of those who speak, to adhere to their human word as such, to rejoice or not to rejoice in it, to accept it or to reject it, as though the word spoken was only this human word and not the Word of

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God. That it is men who speak must, of course, be taken into account with all its consequences. Nothing that this fact implies may be supp~essed. But we can think meaningfully and practically about it only when we bear in mind first the prime consideration that these men speak and must be heard as members of the body of Christ and in the name of the Church, and that the Church is the assembly of those to whom, in all their humanity, the Word of God is entrusted. Above all criticism, even above self-criticism, the proclamation of this insight belongs to the Church's proclamation. It is only in the light of it that we can exercise the necessary criticism and self-criticism. This is what decides whether we do it in faith or lack of faith, and therefore profitably or otherwise. If a man has to say No to himself at this point for the sake of the Yes, the No must not try to stand arrogantly or regretfully upon itself-as though the Law precedes the Gospel. It cannot, therefore, be the starting-point of our deliberations. On the contrary, it must derive from the fundamental and original Yes of the grace of God, if it is to be spoken in its right place for the sake of this Yes. In this connexion the authoritative Yes of divine grace is the reality of the divine commission laid upon the Church, and in it and with it the reality of the presence and action of the Word of God in the proclamation of the Church. Calvin described the proclamation of the Church in this way: Nous ne pouvons point estre prescheurs pour forger et bastir ce que bon nous semblera et pour abruver le peuple de nos fantasies,

mais

la parole de verite nous tient obligez, et celuy qui parle et celuy qui escoute. Car Dieu veut dominer sur nous, jesus Christ, luy seul veut avoir toute maistriseEN1 (Serm. on 2 Tim. 214f., C.R. 54. 151). And: Puis qu 'ainsi est donc que nostre Seigneur jesus Christ s 'est acquis une telle authorite, quand il a este esleve la haut au ciel et qu 'il a toute superiorite sur toutes creatures: que nous apprenions de nous ranger sous luy et que cela soit pour nous tenir en bride, que sa Parole soit receue de nous et que nous sachions qu'il nous gouverne, etfaut que nous souffrions d 'estre enseignez en son nom, et que sa Parole qui nous

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est preschee, combien qu'elle procede de la bou,che des hommes, si est-ce que c'est en l'authorite de Dieu, et que nostre salut doit estre fonde la dessus aitssi Men que si le ciel s'ouvroit cent mille fois pour nous manifester la gloire de DieuEN2 (Serm. on. Gal. 1If., C.R. 50, 286). And at this point we may recall a noteworthy remark of Luther's. At one time I used to think (Prol., 1927,415 f.) that its

content should be rejected as an exaggeration which leads inevitably to the Catholic doctrine of the infallibility of the Church's teaching office. But a closer examination of the context has convinced me that if Luther was expressing himself forcibly-we might almost say on the razor'.s edge between truth and error-he was only stating the truth when he said: "It is certainly true, to speak realistically, that holy Church is not without sin, as it confesses in the Lord's Prayer: Forgive us our trespasses. So too John: If we say that we have no sin, we EN1

EN2

We cannot be preachers to forge and build that which seems good to us, and shower the people with our fantasie.s, but the word oftru,th holds us obliged, whoever speaks and whoever listens. For God wants to be Lord over us; Jesus Christ alone wants to have all majesty Since it is the case that our LordJesus Christ acquired such an authority when he was raised into the heavens on high, since he has all superiority over every creature: therefore we learn to order ourselves under him and that that should hold us in restraint; that his Word should be received by us and that we know that he governs us, and that we must suf~er to be taught in his name; such that his Word which is preached to us, although it proceeds from the mouth of men, is on the authority of God, and our salvation must be established there on high as much as if heaven opened a hundred thousand times to manifest to us the glory of God

4

1.

The Word of God and the Word of Man in Christian Preaching

deceive ourselves, and make God a liar who alwaysdescribes us as sinners. Or, again, Rom. 3 and Ps. 14 and S1. But doctrine is not sinful or culpable; nor does it belong to the Lord's Prayer when we say: Forgive us our trespasses; for doctrine is not our doing, but God's own Word which can neither sin, nor do wrong. For a preacher must not say the Lord's Prayer, nor ask forgiveness of sins, when he has preached (ifhe is a true preacher), but must confess and exult with jeremiah: Lord, thou knowest that what has gone forth from my mouth is right and pleasing to thee. He must boldly saywith St. Paul and all the apostles and prophets: Haec dixit dominusEN3• Thus saith God Himself; or, again: In this sermon, I am a confessed apostle and prophet of jesus Christ. It is neither necessary nor good to ask here for forgiveness of sins, as though the teaching were false. For it is not my word but God's, which He neither will nor can forgive me, and for which He must alwayspraise and reward me, saying: You have taught rightly for I have spoken through you and the Word is mine. Whoever cannot boast thus of his preaching repudiates preaching; for he expressly denies and slanders God" (Wider Hans Worst, IS41, WA. SI, S16, IS). We will adduce later a passage which follows shortly after and which clarifies the ambiguity of these words. But even in themselves they are not open to misunderstanding so long as we remember that Luther is speaking here of the grace of God in the Church's commission, which necessarily precedes all criticism, and even more necessarily, all self-criticism. In so far as he speaks in fulfilment of this commission, as a "true preacher," i.e., in so far as he stands in indirect identity with jesus Christ and the biblical witnesses, the preacher certainly does not need any forgiveness of sins, just as certainly as he does need it in so far as he is the one who discharges this commission in his own words, concerning the doubtfulness of which Luther also realised the essential facts. The threatened "dangers" ought not to be our first concern, but the recognition of the greatness of the divine gift and institution as such. Only as measured against this can we really see the "dangers" as such, and legitimately take the appropriate precautions.

The divine simplicity precedes every man-made complication. Above all the misery of the Church is the glory of the commission with which it is entrusted. All kinds of theoretical and practical difficulties are connected with the fact that the Church's preaching is the Word of God. In relation to them we cannot pause too firmly to survey them from this vantage-point, in undisputed recognition that the Church does have this commission, and that therefore its proclamation is the Word of God. By this is meant that this fact is of the same nature as the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in whIch we have to recognise in conjunction God's revelation and the divine appointment and authorisation of His witnesses. There is more to it than that, for as a fact which rests only on the power of the revelation and the testimony, it must be understood as included in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The reason why it is so necessary to understand it in this sense is that we will then value it as an appointment and gift which precedes, transcends and surpasses every human accomplishment or failure. It is only from this point of view that we will acquire the right relation to the subordinate fact of human accomplishment or failure. That the proclamation of the Church is the Word of God implies for the members of the Church both a law and a duty, and it is particularly from this point of view that we shall have to weigh the identification in relation to the work of dogmatics. But it is not the case that this identification gains truth and validity only EN:~

Thus says the Lord

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The Mission of the Church

when in the Church man achieves the fulfilment of this law, or only when he masters the task of preaching the Word of God. It is not, therefore, the case that we have first to 'look around us and see what is being actually attained and performed in the Church in the matter of proclamation, and then, if the result turns out to be to some extent satisfactory, we can recognise the truth of this identification and admit its validity. It is clear that by this method, as is always the case when we insist on beginning with law and our own fulfilment of the law, we could only end in levity or despair. Ifwe consider what men are doing in the Church, ourselves or others, it is only by a crude self-deception that we can come to the conclusion that the Word of God is really being preached there. And when we have grown tired of this self-deception, if we still consider men. in the Church, we shall arrive at. the diametrically opposite but no less arbitrary conclusion, that the Word of God is not being preached in the Church. The first thing is that this identification of the Church's proclamation with God's Word is valid; and then as such it becomes a law and duty for those who are in the Church. The first thing is that it must be believed as it stands; and it is only then that we can and must give ourselves to the humility, care and exertions which are appropriate to those who are in the Church. In this respect, too, if it is to be taken seriously and held in honour, the Law must be believed and understood as first and foremost the Law fulfilled inJesus Christ. What has to happen in order that the proclamation of the Church may be the Word of God, and that men in the Church may really proclaim the Word of God, has already happened, as, generally speaking, everything that has to happen in order that the Church may live as the Church of God has already happened. Provision has been made that in the Church men may again and again believe and hope and love, that in it the name of God may be constantly invoked in thankful prayer, that in it the disciples of Jesus may ever and again suffer, and that in it brother may find brother and receive his help. All that has been provided. No presupposition is required from us. We are not even asked whether we see it all performed and fulfilled by ourselves or others. Our business can only be that of accepting as something which has happened for us and to us that which has already been performed and fulfilled in Jesus Christ in respect of the whole life of the Church. It is always in this acceptance that the Church lives its life as created byJesus Christ and rooted in Him. The same is true iJ;lrelation to the proclamat~on of the Word of God, which is only one of the functions of the life of the Church. It can be only a question of accepting what has already been created and founded in Jesus Christ. It is not we who have to care for the truth and validity of the identification of proclamation in the Church with the Word of God. We have to accept that it is so and allow it to be true. Because Jesus Christ has risen, because God's revelation and testimonies are, therefore, given to the Church, it receives and holds His commission, which means that it has Himself in its midst as the Lord of its speaking, the Lord who in and through its speaking bears witness to Himself. Humanly speaking, it is a stark impossibility which here stares us in the face-that men 6

I.

The Word of God and the Word of Man in Christian Preaching

should speak what God speaks; but it is one which in Jesus Christ is already overcome. At the hands of those for whom it was in fact an impossibility, it brought as a blasphemer to the cross the One for whom it was not an impossibility, in order that it might be revealed in His resurrection as the new possibility for man, to be imparted by Him to His prophets and apostles and to be conveyed by their witness to the Church. Only by wanting to look at ourselves instead of at Jesus Christ can we maintain this impossibility and set it against the truth of that identification. In itself it has been cancelled and transformed into its opposite. We ought not to be concerned on account of this impossibility, for on its own account we are relieved of all responsibility. What ought to concern us is that again and again we so obstinately tend to look to ourselves instead of to Jesus Christ. In Him everything has happened for and to the Church, that it might be true that its proclamation is the Word of God. And it can only be a question of our not resisting the Holy Spirit who saysjust this to us, and who will uphold us in all circumstances through all the actual human accomplishment or failure which is visible in the Church. It is only when we hold fast to this truth that we can survey this sphere and exist in it with neither frivolity nor despair, and therefore critically, in readiness both to decide and to act. That there is a Word of God for the Church; that above all human authority and freedom in the Church there is the authority and freedom of this Word of God; and again that beneath the Word there is a genuine human authority and freedom in the Church: that is something which must first and foremost be apprehended, accepted and reckoned with. This apprehension, acceptance and reckoning is not to be understood abstractly, as though we had to provide that which only Jesus Christ can and has provided, but concretely: as the Church for which Jesus Christ has provided we are now able to struggle manfully against the great human impossibility. Let it be understood that here again it is not a question of a theory but of the most intimate and decisive practice. In the ministry of the Church's preaching, how can even a single word be said and heard responsibly, without the presupposition of Luther: Haec dixit Dominus; i.e., without the presupposition that provision has been made by the Word of God itself for the utterance of the Word of God amid the frailty of what takes place here on the human level? What presumption it would be to dare to be a Church and to speak and hear as a Church without this presupposition! But doubt of the presupposition is itself presumption of this kind. And if humanly speaking there is to be any help for that frailty, in what can it consist but in the fact that we do not doubt the presupposition, that we hold fast to the truth that inJesus Christ everything has happened which is necessary to the presence of the Word of God in the Church, and that therefore the human happening in which actively or passivelywe participate is placed in the light of that which is in fact taking place in its midst: God's own proclamation of His revelation and His witnesses?

The human impossibility of the Church's proclamation consists simply in the impossibility of the attempt to speak of God. It is this which, humanly considered, is attempted in the Church's proclamation. In this connexion we may think of the term in its narrowest and proper sense, that is, preaching and

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sacraments. Or we may think of the proclamation attempted indirectly through the medium of the Church's prayer and worship, its confession and instruction, pastoral activity and, not least, of theology itself, although here the real and immediate task is not that of proclamation. Over this whole field the attempt is made to speak of God with the intention that others shall hear of Him. This attempt and intention are as such impossible. God does not belong to the world. Therefore He does not belong to the series of objects for which we have categories and words by means of which we draw the attention of others to them, and bring them into relation with them. Of God it is impossible to speak, because He is neither a natural nor a spiritual object. Ifwe speak of Him, we are no longer speaking of Him. In this matter we cannot do what we want to do and we cannot attain what we should like to attain. This is the iron law under which all Church proclamation without exception stands. That what happens here happens in frailty is far too weak an expression for the real situation. This is not frailty. It is death. This is not difficulty. It is sheer impossibility. What happens here is not something imperfect. Measured by the standard of what is intended, it is simply nothing.

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This iron law itself cannot be understood without the prior assumption that the proclamation of the Church is the Word of God. It is not understandable as something in itself, nor as a general truth. The mystic and agnostic philosophers apparently use the same phrases. They speak of God and they saythe same things about Him in what seem to be very much the same language: that it is not possible for us to speak of Him. But by God they do not mean the Creator of heaven and earth, the Lord and Judge and Saviour of man. They do not mean the One whose hiddenness and incomprehensibility are His own mighty work. They do not mean the One before whom man must bow. They do not mean the One whose interdict and expulsion of man from Paradise makes it impossible for him to speak of God. They do not speak of the One in whose mighty hand it rests to make possible this impossibility and who, in giving to man this new possibility, reveals to him the impossibility of trYing to do it outof his own resources. What do the mystics or agnostics know of this God and His hiddenness and mysteriousness? What they mean is the unutterableness of the ultimate depth of the mystery of the world and the human soul, the unutterableness of a depth in which man can probe far enough to see for himself that it is unutterable, that he cannot speak of it, thinking he knows it so well, and bringing it under his own control, even as a depth which is unutterable. But what is there common between this depth which man himself discovers and controls, and the depth of God? Nothing but the name. And that this is so is shown by the fact that although we are not supposed to be able to speak of the so-called "God" of this teaching, in virtue of the same competence with which His objectivity was denied He usually becomes the object of the greatest and most comforting eloquence. That man really cannot really speak of God is only realised when it is known that,he really can really speak of God, because God Himself with His Word and Spirit steps forth, and has already stepped forth, into the midst, in order to make possible for man that which is not possible for him of himself. It requires the God Who Himself speaks for Himself, it requires the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the power which enables us to speak rightly of God, if man is to be so convinced at the cross of Jesus Christ of God's real hiddenness and incomprehensibility, as determined and effected by Himself, that he sees and confesses that of himself he cannot speak of God. On the basis of this assumption alone does it become transparent to him that proclamation as the human undertaking to speak of God, and let others hear of God, is condemned to 8

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The Word of God and the Word of Man in Christian Preaching

failure. It then becomes plain to him that he had not meant God at all when previously as a self-assured mystic or sceptic he had affirmed and denied in the very same breath the unutterableness of God.

If there is proclamation, if the attempt does not fail, it is just at the point where success is achieved that it can and will be understood, not as a human success, but as a divine victory concealed in human failure, sovereignly availing itself of human failure. God then makes good what we do badly. And the fact that God makes good what we do badly cannot be understood as a dialectical change which, so to speak, takes place naturally. It cannot be postulated or assumed as a consequence which in some ways follows necessarily. It can only be hoped by faith in the foundation which God Himself has laid for the Church, that is, by faith in Jesus Christ. What then happens is by no means a matter of course-the very achievement of this divine victory forbids us to think it self-explanatory. For what happens is that men are really able to speak of God, and to let others hear of Him. But, again, it is not self-explanatory that this is not self-explanatory. All the poverty and helplessness and confusion and impotence of Church proclamation to ourselves and others, as we think we see it in our own age and in every age; the whole sea of impure doctrine in which the Word of God seems formally to be drowned in the Church's proclamation; everything which might cause us to doubt the truth of the identification as we see the actual state and course of things in the Church: all these things are a reminder that this victory is not achieved self-evidently; that it can be only a divine victory, a miracle. Yet even the most painful aspect of the Church has not the power to dissuade us from regarding it as self-evident. Ifwe are in fact dissuaded, it is because the identification of the Church's proclamation with the Word of God is true. The achievement of the divine victory stands out miraculously to comfort and to warn, not merely against the bad aspect, but against every aspect that the Church can present. In that achievement grace itself assures us that it is achieved by grace, and not as the result of some selfexplanatory dialectical necessity. Jesus Christ in the power of His resurrection is present wherever men really speak really of God. It is not this or that aspect of the empirical Church but the very glory of this event which casts the deep shadow on all human action in the Church, which makes our need plain to us by delivering us from need, and compels us to recognise that of ourselves we are not able to speak of God. A few pages after the apparently dubious passage about the unhesitating boldness with which the Christian preacher should believe that his word is the Word of God that needs no forgiveness, Luther has the following (op. cit., p. 519, 6 f.): "Nowlook, my dear friend, what a strange thing it is, that we, who assuredly teach the Word of God, are so weak and in our great humility so timid, that we do not like to boast that we are the witnesses, servants, preachers, prophets, etc. of God's Church, and that God speaks through us. Yet this is assuredly what we are, since we assuredly have and teach His Word. Such [Luther originally wrote: despairing hearts constitute the sin of being terrified before God and of not being able to think ourselves worthy (as indeed we are not) and of not trusting that God speaks

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with and through us (as does in fact certainly happen)] timidity arises from the fact that we earnestly believe that God's Word is such a splendid, majestic thing, that we know ourselves all too unworthy that such a great thing should be spoken and done through us, who still live in flesh and blood. But our adversaries, the devils, hordes of papists and all the world, are joyful and undaunted; in their great holiness they presume impudently to say: Here is God; we are the ministers, prophets and apostles of God's Church, just as all false prophets have alwaysdone. So that even Heintz worst* dares to boast himself a Christian prince. But humility and fear in God's Word has at all times been the true mark of the true Church, boldness and audacity in human arrogance has been the true mark of devils, as indeed cannot but be noticed manifestly even in the Pope's "decretals." Thus [note how Luther corrects himself] the recognition of our incapacity does not come primarily from sin, but from the faith (which alone makes possible the awareness of sin) that "God's Word is such a splendid, majestic thing." And it is when this faith is absent, when we can only find the confidence of the Christian preacher dubious and reject it, that there is no place for this recognition.

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It is only from the belief that the Church's proclamation is really divine that the recognition of the hopelessness of its humanity follows, and therefore the recognition that in its humanity it can live only by its divinity, that is, by the grace of the Word of God given to the Church. It is not from the more or less blurred aspect of the state and course of Church affairs, but from this faith that the recognition must come that the human preacher in the Church does not cease to be a wholly human preacher. His speech is still a human, all too human speech about God. In its~lf it certainly does not attain its goal and purpose. It does not matter so much that it is open to the charges of mysticism and scepticism, which also want to tell us in their own way that man cannot speak about God. For those who level accusations from this point of view do not know what they are saying. Accusations which come from this source do not touch the depth, the real need of the humanity of Church proclamation. What is quite intolerable is the judgment of the living God under which the human aspect stands as participant in His grace. God Himself disputes with man. God Himself objects that he cannot speak of God, that placed under God's Word he can speak only in human authority and freedom. This is what presses upon us an iron law and makes the situation quite unbearable. This is what occasions anxiety concerning what man has to say. The demand is that it be said purely, correctly, seriously, strictly and weightily. This will certainly confront man, in relation to what he has to say, with a task from whose discharge he will not be released as long as he lives. Luther himself in this second passage has shown that it is necessary not to omit the descent from the height indicated in the first passage to the corresponding depth. It is in this light that we recall the sober sentence of Calvin: Tamen retinenda est distinctio, ut quid homo per se valeat, quid Deo proprium sit, meminerimusEN4 (Instit. IV, 14, 11). When we remember: quid

* Nickname EN4

given by Luther to Heinrich II of Brunswick, see Wider Hans Worst (1541)-now further complicated by pun on Heinz (for Heinrich)-Trans. Although the difference must be maintained, so that we remember what man can do in himself, and what is proper to God

10

1.

The Word of God and the Word of Man in Christian Preaching

homo per se valeatEN5, then the fifth petition of the Lord's Prayer will certainly be indispensable for the human preacher in the Church. For: Nisi ipse nos assiduo sustentet, nihil prodest summa cognitio et ipsissima TheologiaEN6 (Luther, Comm. on Gal. 213, 1535, WA. 401, 2°5,24).

Help in this attack can be expected only from the God from whom it comes. If the attack of that iron law had an immanent basis in the human situation as such, immanental victories or alleviations could and would have to be considered. But in the immanence of the human situation as such there are no mortal dangers. There are no iron laws beyond which man cannot see his way, which with more or less good luck he cannot transform into their opposite and so render innocuous, which indeed are not really contradicted somehow and somewhere in the realm of immanence. In so far as it indicates a general human impossibility, the fact that man cannot speak of God may mean in practice that in the power of despair which is man's own work he can actually do so very well. And the despair may be followed at once by the corresponding and more or less deeply grounded levity. An attack of this kind is not dangerous. But the real attack which comes from God is dangerous. The man whose mouth is closed by God cannot in any circumstances try to open it himself without the judgment under which he stands becoming a judgment of death. His mouth can be opened again only in so far as God Himself places His own Word in it. It is only in the power of the authority and freedom of the Word which marks and limits his human authority and freedom that he will not collapse under the judgment which this mark and limitation implies concerning all his willing and doing, but on the contrary be upheld and blessed in all that he wills and does. And the same applies mutatis mutandisEN7 to the whole hearing of the Church's proclamation. Because it is God's Word, the human word of Christian preaching always involves opposition. Not the slight opposition which arises from the probably ill-concealed weakness of all words spoken by men. Not, therefore, what man in his human judgment as a hearer of these human words may criticise and miss in them. But the wholly concealed yet utterly real judgment of God under which they stand, because the Church's proclamation is the Word of God, because God exposes man as a sinner even as He is gracious to him, because God opposes man as He receives him, because "God's Word is so splendid and majestic a thing," disclosing the humanity of man in a way which the faults which man may commit in our eyes can never do. If this opposition is to be resolved, it cannot happen immanently, within the sphere in which man speaks to man and tries to understand his fellow-man. Here again we must be helped by the very same Lord who lays the burden upon us. EN:; EN6

EN7

in different circumstances Unless He Himself continuously profits nothing in different circumstances

sustains us, the highest knowledge and very greatest theology

11

[754]

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The Mission of the Church

22.

Adhibetur enim sermo veritatis extnnsecus vocis ministerio corporalis, verumtamen

neque qui plantat

est aliquid neque qui rigat, sed qui incrementum. dat Deus (1 Cor. 37). Audit quippe homo dicentem vel hominem, vel angelum; sed ut sentiat et cognoscat verum esse, quod dicitur, illo lumine intus mens eius aspergitur, quod aetemum manet, quod etiam in tenebris lucetEN8 37). Il ne faut point entendre quand

les Sacrificateurs

(Augustine, De pecc. merit. I, 25,

ont office de benir, que ce soit de leur propre

authorite et que Dieu leur ait resigne son office et que sa louange soit amoindrie d 'autant. besogne par ses ministres,

ce n 'est pas qu'il soit diminue

Quand Dieu

de son coste, ne qu 'il faille que sa vertu soit

obscurcie: il ne s 'oste rien de ce qu'il donne. Mais illuy plait d 'user de tels moyens d ceste condition, touiours on revienne d luy et qu 'on ne puise une scale goutte de bien d 'autres fontaines ldEN9 (Calvin, Serm. doctrinae,

2

on. Gen. 14, C.R. 23, 664)' Dominus

eam ab arcana Spiritus

sui virtute

non disiungit.

ministros, quorum opera utatur in ecclesiae suae aedificationem, tus sui virtute, ut efficax sit acfructuosus hominum

ministerio,

discamus

in' salutem

nostram,

separemus ... In summa, nihil est quam Dei manus

simul per ipsos operatur arcana Spiri-

acceptam ferre gratiae Spiritus et organum

sine qua vox hominis

externa praedicatio,

per gratiam

Spiritus

irrita in aere

sed quia organum est divinae

efficax,

quae Deus coniungit,

ne

quos Deus ad se ministri opera convertit, eos convertere dicitur minister, quia (Comm. ad Lc. 116, C.R. 45, 15)' Certum quidem est, eos qui plantant

rigant, nihil esse, sed quoties Dominus

et

benedicere vult eorum labori, Spiritus sui virtute facit, ut efficax

sit eorum doctrina: et vox quae per se mortua est, vitae aeternae sit organum 125,

laudem tribuit externae

quia Deus homines sibi deligit

eorum labor. Quoties hanc efficaciam commendat scriptura in

difflueret .... Nihil per se, fateor, et separatimpotest virtutis

ubi tantam Nam

que

que ceste source

ENIO

(Comm. ad

1

Pet.

C.R. 55, 23 1) .

Even in relation to what the true Christian preacher says, if we consider abstractly what he has to say as a man in this function, the saying in Rom. 34 is applicable: God is true, but all men are liars. As a true Christian preacher he spe.aks only as a man, and therefore under the judgment of all human speech. But this fact cannot be considered abstractly without denying the Church as the body of jesus Christ andJesus Christ as its Head. We do not say absolutely For the word of truth is applied by the outward ministry of physical speech, yet all the same, 'neither the one who plants, nor the one who waters is anything, but God who gives the increase' (1 Cor 3.7). Of course a man can hear someone speaking, whether a man or an angel; but in order tha~ he sense and know that what is said is true, his inner mind is sprinkled by that light which remains forever, which shines even in the darkness EN 9 It should not be understood when the priests have the office of blessing that this might be on their own authority, and that'God has resigned His office' to them, and that His praise be correspondingly lessened. When God works through His ministers, It is not that He is diminished on His part, such that His power unfailingly fades. He takes away nothing which he gives. But it is pleasing to Him to use such means, on condition that one always returns to Him and does not draw a single drop of goodness from fountains other than His source ENIO When the Lord ascribes such great praise to outward teaching, he does not separate it from the secret power of His Spirit. For when God chooses men for Himself as ministers, whose works he uses for the edification of His Church, He is at the same time working through them by the secret power of His Spirit, so that their labour might be effective and fruitful. Whenever Scripture commends that efficacy in the ministries of men, let us learn to ascribe what has been received to the grace of the Spirit, without which the voice of man would be useless, and float out into the air ... I declare that the outward act of preaching is nothing in itself and taken on its own, can do nothing, but since it is an instrument of divine power for our salvation, and is an effective instrument by the grace of the Spirit which God joins to it, we should not separate them ... In sum, those whom God converts to Himself through the work of a minister, the minister is said to convert, since he is nothing other than a hand of God EN 8

12

1.

The Word of God and the Word of Man in Christian Preaching

that it cannot be considered abstractly. We do not say that, armed with the conception of an outpouring of the Holy Ghost upon the Church and its office, one can overlook even for a moment the human fallibility of everything that the Church says about God. We can identify the Church with its Lord only indirectly, in the unity of the body with its head. It is plain that otherwise we return to the channels of Roman Catholic thought about the Church and the Church's authority. The human frailty of the Church's proclamation must be constantly borne in mind to the precise extent that we have to be clear that both those who speak and those who hear in this matter necessarily rely on the free grace of God and therefore on prayer. But if they are dependent on prayer, undoubtedly they are also dependent on serious and honest work. For how can they pray if, even in praying, they do not also work? How can they pray if they indolently rely upon a spiritual outpouring which is going to come or has already come on them? How can they pray if they do not eagerly and persistently aspire to the Word of God for which they pray? But in saying this, we have already implied that there can be no abstract consideration of the humanity of the Church's proclamation which stands in such need of grace and of prayer. If we depend on the free grace of God, knowing we are lost without it, if we are sincerely humbled by it and led into prayer, in this state of humiliation, of pure dependence, of nothingness in the face of God, we cannot try to be somehow defiant and despondent in ourselves. For how then can it be our nothingness before God? It is a selfcontradiction, which is only possible as we deny Jesus Christ, to interpret the relativity of our situation, its human fallibility and sinfulness, as something absolute and final, or, as it were, to let ourselves go down in the assault. Ifwe do, do we not reveal that we have not at all understood the fact that it is God Himselfwho contends with us and that we have not really submitted and subjected ourselves to this real judgment of God? To make an absolute of human powerlessness is always the sign that true human powerlessness before God is concealed from us. The latter cannot be turned into something unqualified. It is such complete impotence before God that it does not permit us to flee from God, not even in the form of trying to remain staring into the abyss to which it leads us, as though in that way it would become deeper, as though we had to make the judgment under which we stand even more serious, just and terrible by ourselves constituting it our judge in our own case. Really judged by God, man has simply nothing left except to cling to the One who judges him, and therefore to divine grace. We are really judged only by the grace of God. But if we are really judged, how can we assert ourselves in any way before the One who judges us? How can anything happen but that we believe in the grace which He so forcefully offers? There is nothing arbitrary or hypothetical about this change. It is not we ourselves who bring it about. But on the cross at Golgotha this conclusive judgment has been passed upon us, exposing all men as liars and stopping every mouth. And because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, we are transposed into the kingdom of God's grace. This transformation

[755]

[756]

~ 22.

[757]

The Mission of the Church

is to be accepted as a fact. It is in the light of it (which means, concretely) that our humanity and the humanity of the Church's proclamation is to be seen. It is true that the self-disclosure and self-testimony of the Word of God take place in the Church in a hiddenness which it is God's business and not ours to terminate or even provisionally to disclose. It is true that human words, as the signs by which Christian preaching points to the self-disclosure and selftestimony of the Word of God, only become operative when they are inspired and used by God Himself by the Holy Spirit. It is true that it does not cease to be grace when God acknowledges the human word spoken and heard in His Church. For this Church is a Church of sinners, and it is continually revealed to be such by the fact that God acknowledges its word. It is, therefore, true that the embarrassment remains in which we are involved by the question whether and how far we can speak of God and hear of Him. It is true that to think we can do this is always a venture for which without God's own action we necessarily lack the authority, insight and courage. It is true that God alone can speak about God. Only it is not to be forgotten that all these considerations can only be qualifications and elucidations of the positive affirmation that God gives the Church the task of speaking about Him, and that in so far as the Church fulfils this task God, Himself is in its midst to proclaim His revelations and testimonies. These necessary qualifications and elucidations will have to mean that the Church cannot afford to fall into any kind of arrogance or to surrender itself to any kind of self-assurance when in the fulfilment of its ministry it speaks of God. Inevitably the presumption of a clericalism for which miracle ceases to be miracle, grace to be grace, and venture to be venture, is the enemy against which the Church has to contend more fiercely than any other, because this enemy attacks it, as it were, at its most central nerve, and its triumph would necessarily involve the destruction of its very essence. But, secondly, they will have to mean the need to take the task incumbent upon men in the Church, the problem of Christian preaching, as seriously as any human task can be taken. In the Church which is charged with this ministry the commitment of the member is beyond computation. There is no possible place for idleness, indifference or lukewarmness. No appeal can be made to human imperfection where the claim is directed to the very man whose incapacity and unworthiness for this ministry is known and admitted even when he is charged with it, without altering the fact that he really is charged with it. If there is no escape in arrogance, there is no escape in pusillanimity or indolence. He can entertain no illusions, but he has no excuse for diffidence or nonchalance. He can only address himself to the task without pretensions and without reservations. This is what the qualifications and elucidations imply. But they can never become arguments against the positive truth that the members of the Church in all their humanity are invited to share in God's own work of proclaiming His Word. They can never be obstacles to our believing in this positive truth and therefore to our accepting the vocation it implies and holding ourselves in readiness for the service it involves. If they do become obstacles

1.

The Word of God and the Word of Man in Christian Preaching

for us, this only shows our failure to understand them, that they are not the great attack of God upon us, from which they derive when they have power. They are the accusations of a kind of scepticism in the guise of piety. We are making them ourselves, not as members of the Church, but in assertion of the arrogance and diffidence of those who wish to evade the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. The only power they can have is that of accusations which we ourselves can make. They cannot have real power unless they arise from the realisation that the Son of God has come in the flesh, that His Holy Ghost has been poured out upon the Church, and that the duty of speaking about God has been laid on the Church. They cannot have real power unless they arise, not from unbelief, but from faith. And the power which they then have will be not the power of destruction, paralysis and discouragement, but in a twofold sense, directed against both our pride and our diffidence, the power of salutary criticism. And behind and above this criticism will stand the transformation which was wrought at the cross and on Easter Day. As members of the Church we share in this transformation (which we ourselves certainly cannot effect either in reality or in thought) in so far as we accept its reality in faith. But that means that we do not escape but accept the salutary criticism and the great assault. And to accept this transformation means to recognise and confess: "He is present with us, in the power of His Spirit and gifts." To accept it means, in all our reflection about the humanity of the Church and ourselves, to look beyond it, and beyond all its incapacity and unworthiness, to the foundation and beginning of the Church and to its existence in Jesus Christ. There, in Him, it is not unworthy and not incapable of speaking about God. There it is all that it has to be for this purpose. There it has everything that it needs for it. There it is justified and sanctified, blessed and authorised in its action. There the miracle has already happened which has to happen to a man if he is to speak about God-really speak about God. The Church looks to Jesus Christ. It allows Him to be its own life, and therefore its consolation. It does not cling to its own humanity-either in arrogance or diffidence-but to the task imposed upon it in its humanity. And as it does so, it can confess, but with a final certainty, that as it speaks about God in human words, it proclaims God's own Word. But doing this, how can it fall into arrogance or indolence? It can do so only if it is uncertain in this confession. And it will be uncertain in this confession only if it allows itself to look elsewhere than to Jesus Christ. If it does not look elsewhere, all the opposition to which this confession can give rise has already been overcome. It can then tolerate the inevitable reproach that this confession is far too audacious and presumptuous. The world outside certainly cannot make this reproach any more sharply than it has already been made from the standpoint of the Church's foundation, origin and life in Jesus Christ. As made by the world, it can touch the Church only if it is not content continually to hear it-again in the sense of salutary criticism-from within, that is, from the source from which it also derives its comfort. If it is content to hear it from this source, it

[758]

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22.

The Mission of the Church

can also be content not to be affected by the reproach which comes from without.

2.

[759]

PURE DOCTRINE AS THE PROBLEM OF DOGMATICS

Christian preaching is speaking about God in the name ofjesus Christ. It is a human activity like any other. It is not only that. It has its own special necessity and its own special promise, in virtue of which it is a work of God, indeed the Word of God Himself; and this no less than His revelation in jesus Christ and its attestation in Holy Scripture. Its life as a human activity derives (objectively) from the fact that this work of God takes place within it, and (subjectively) from the fact that members of the Church believe in this promise. But it is a human activity. Its ..essential character, principles and problems can be described like those of any other human activity. Like any other it can be performed thoroughly or superficially, conscientiously or carelessly, well or badly. We have seen that the Church's commission and therefore the promise of God's own presence and action themselves imply a total claim made upon the member of the Church. This means, therefore, that what he says about God is subjected to a norm and receives an appointed goal. It means that he is faced with the question of the correctness of his action. The promise of the miracle of God's grace cannot exempt him from facing up to this question. Even if grace is grace, miracle miracle and venture venture, even in recollection and expectation, even in the very presence of divine action, man is still man, and ~lthoughby the divine promise he is relieved of anxiety about the success, justification and sanctification of his action, he is not relieved of responsibility for it. He himself, man, is called to the ministry of preaching. He has the promise of divine grace and miracle-but he is really called. He cannot retreat into the audience from which he can watch comfortably the operation of the grace and miracle of the work which God Himself performs. He and his action, and his human speech about God, are required to be the stage for this work. If this implies, as we have seen, a judgment, and indeed a radical judgment upon his action, it also implies that his action receives a certain definite aim by which it must be measured, and within the scope of which it must run its course. Therefore just because Christian preaching is not merely a human action but also the self-proclamation of the Word of God, a problem arises which we have to tackle seriously and intelligently-the problem of the place of the human action within this self-proclamation, the problem of Christian preaching in so far as it is a human activity comparable with other human activities. It is to be noted that there can be no real problem of Christian preaching, or serious and intelligent consideration of it, except from this angle. Let us suppose for a moment that we do not have to reckon with this indirect identity between the Word of God and the word of man in Christian preaching, because no such promise has been given to the Church or is

16

2.

Pure Doctrine as the Problem of Dogmatics

believed by it. Its action acquires at once at this distinctive focal point the character of a fantastic undertaking for which there is no real place even on earth, and about whose essential character, principles and problems we can think and speak only in the deepest anxiety and bewilderment. What is preaching if it speaks about God but is not the Word of God Himself? What is the source of its problem and the serious consideration of its problem? Is it part of the life of the community, or of the functions of the civil power, to see that God is spoken about somewhere? Or is preaching a specific form of the moral education of the human race? Or with what it communicates concerning God and the things of God, does it belong to intellectual culture? There have been times, indeed, when a friendly scepticism and tolerance has obtained in these matters on the part of the state, society, philosophy and science. There have been times which have seen a readiness even to demand or to look favourably upon the service of the Church in this sense. There have been times when even the Church itself has thought it necessary to pose the problem of preaching largely in this sense. Such times may come again. But it is quite impossible to understand such times except as an error pleasant for both parties. And in any case, since the 18th century, it has mostly become clear again that Christian preaching declares itself to be superfluous when it allows itself to be used in this way. Uninterruptedly absorbed in progress towards its own deification, the state feels less and less the need that God should be spoken about. The tasks of popular instruction and education seem to depend less and less on the theologians, and more and more to be better fulfilled by others than they could be by theologians even if, as amateurs in these fields, the latter had a better conscience than amateurs can have. Therefore the extraneous and alien tasks are being cancelled and forgotten. Without its own commission, without the justification and authority of God's own speaking, an unauthorised message about God more and more ceases to be a serious problem and more and more becomes an almost illusory possibility. If a message of this kind is not delivered in its own genuine context, growing from its own root and subject to its own criterion, the probability is that sooner or later it will cease to be delivered at all. And perhaps it is the case that our time only makes it apparent that even on the plane of human action it is impossible to speak about God apart from this context, root and criterion. It is as well that we should reckon with the fact that this is the case even if it may again become less apparent in future epochs than it is to-day.

If the assumption is valid that when the Church speaks of God God Himself will and does speak of Himself, then this human action as such is confronted by a definite task. It will have to be an action in the service of what God Himself will and does do. And we shall have to take the term service quite strictly. Neither as a whole nor in detail can there be any autonomous goal. Nor can the form and method of the action be a matter for the independent decision of those taking part. A minister in the ministerium verbi diviniEN11 is not in the least comparable, for example, with a subordinate officer in the army, or a civil servant or the head of a business department, who, in the measures he takes and the method by which he proceeds, has to bear a part of the responsibility, and to that extent take independent action and decisions. If the sovereignty of God is to be served, we obviously cannot establish in face of it any such subordinate centres of human control. Or at least, it is only per nefasENl2 and not of right that this can happen. But that means that the responsibility of this service EN II EN I ~

ministry of the divine Word wrongly

[760]

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[761]

22.

The Mission of the Church

is incomparably greater than that of any other service. For although the initiative and activity of men are no less intensively demanded, there can be no question at all of any independent decisions. On the contrary, the independent human decisions in their rightness or wrongn'ess depend on the fact that, not only as a whole but also in detail, not only in content but also in form, they are decisions of an obedience in which the only will of man is to co-operate in the realisation of God's work as He Himself has determined it down to its details and form. In this matter every deviation from the way which God Himself treads (even though it takes place after the best and most conscientious reflection), every decision taken freely in disregard of God's own work, necessarily implies disservice. It calls in question the basic assumption that "God Himself declares His revelation in His witnesses." Its immediate and inevitable result is to shake the confidence in which alone this service.can be performed. The completeness of obedience to God results from the completeness of faith in His own presence and action; but, again, it is only when the obedience is complete that the faith can also be complete. The highest degree of exertion in this seFvice implies the greatest selflessness. Then, and only then, can it be fulfilled in the greatest certitude. It is as it renders this service to the Word of God, conceived in the strict sense of the term, that the Church undertakes the task laid upon it, and recognises the divine gift offered to it in- the fact that Jesus Christ is the Head by which, in the Word and Spirit imparted to His biblical witnesses, it is founded, maintained and ruled. It is as it renders this service that it thankfully receives this benefit, is built up in its members, and allows itself to be used as the light of God's imminent kingdom kindled in this world. But everything depends on whether it does render this particular service, whetber its recognition of God is so deep that without cessation or interruption it advances on its divinely appointed way, and any other action but this service harms and incapacitates it, and it is increasingly pressed into this service as the only kind of. activity by which it can really be justified before God and man. How can the Church be legitimated except by manifestation of the supremacy of God's free grace operating towards it and through it? The service 'Ofproclamation demanded of it is bound up with this manifestation. The comprehensive term to denote the content of the service of God as understood in this way is that of pure doctrine. The well-known definition of the Church in Conf. Aug. 7 runs: Item docent, quod una sancta ecclesiaperpetuo mansura sit. Est autem ecclesia congregatio sanctorum, in qua evangelium pure docetur et recte administrantur sacramenta. Et ad veram unitatem ecclesiaesatis est consentire de doctrina evangelii et de administratione sacramentorumEN13• This definition certainly does not say all that can be said about the task of the Church in the execution of its appointed mission. But it does at least say something which has to be said and which has to be given priority over

EN13

It is taught that there will be one holy Church in perpetuity. Moreover the church is the congregation of the saints, in which the Gospel is purely taught and the sacraments rightly administered. And it is sufficient for the true unity of the Church to agree upon the doctrine of the Gospel and on the administration of the sacraments

18

2.

Pure Doctrine as the Problem of Dogmatics

everything else that can be said on the subject. The one Church ofJesus Christ is defined as the congregation of the saints because it is the holy congregation in which the Gospel is purely taught-otherwise it is not the Church. The recte administrare sacramentaEN14 is related to the pure docere evangelium ENl5 as the sacraments in general are related to the Gospel. They are included in the Gospel. In their own way they are themselves the Gospel. They attest it in the form of a completed action, just as the preaching of the Gospel attests it in the form of the spoken word. Their distinctive feature is that of a corrective to the word of the preacher. In contradistinction to the latter, they expressly testify that the Word of God is not only a word but also an action of God. Therefore in contrast to the pura doctrinaEN16 of the Gospel, their recta administratioENI7 will expressly remind us that the recommended and intended "purity" of doctrine is not an abstract intellectual business. It is really related to the rertitudoEN1H necessarily incumbent upon the Church member, to his edification in accordance with the supremacy of God's free grace.

What does it mean when we say: "Pure doctrine as the problem of Christian preaching"? Let us state at the outset that doctrine, doctrinaENl9, does not mean "theory." Doctrine is distinguished from theory in two ways. First, theory always presupposes a human individual, observing and thinking in his own power and responsibility, forming his own interpretation of a specific object in the whole freedom of reciprocity between man and object in which man will always be the stronger partner, and then giving expression to this interpretation in the form of distinct sequences of ideas. As against this, the idea of doctrine stands in direct connexion with the idea of an 'object transcending the scope of human observation and thought. In no case does doctrine take place in the freedom of reciprocity. Doctrina EN20 falls within the framework of a disciplina EN21. Doctrinal instruction means always the impartation of somethingjust as we have received it, and in such a way that in relation both to right reception and right communication the one who instructs is responsible not only to himself and the object, but also to all those who have to receive this same thing and impart it. The other difference is that a theory has its value in itself. It can be offered to others for discussion and for the eventual clarification and enrichment of their own theories. But it is possible for this not to take place. It can also form the exclusive enjoyment and delight of its author. But doctrine by its very nature is directed towards others. Doctrine may be debatable in fact-of what doctrine will this not be the case?-but it cannot wish to be the object of discussion. Doctrine is not the expression of opinions but of insights. Doctrine is not intended to complete other doctrines. Doctrine intends to state the truth and the whole truth. For this reason it is not a matter of indifference whether it is expressed or not. By its very nature it has to be right administration of the sacraments pure teaching of the Gospel EN 16 pure doctrine EN 17 right administration ENIH rightness ENI9 doctrine EN~() Doctrine EN~1 discipline ENI4

EN l!l

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applied to one's neighbours. Therefore whoever makes of doctrine a theory, whether with the intention of recommending or discrediting it as such, is implicated in a misunderstanding. It is clear that in the service of the Word of God there can be no question of theory but only of doctrine. But what is the meaning of doctrine in this connexion? What is the doctrine of the Gospel, of the Word of God? One thing is clear. By our use of this concept to characterise the service of the Church's preaching, we express a qualification. Even pure doctrine is not in itself the same thing as what God does when He speaks His Word. Doctrine as such cannot be the endowment of the hearer with the Holy Ghost. It cannot be his awakening to faith or even his maintenance and advance therein. It cannot be his conversion. Doctrine as such cannot bring in Jesus Christ. It cannot exhibit or build His Kingdom. It cannot bring about the event of fellowship between God and man as a living reality. If we expect these things from it, we expect too much from it, and perhaps in consequence we expect too little.

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The fact that evangelical doctrine, the human word of the preacher, is indeed qualified in this way, is perhaps brought. out clearly when it is realised that the reete administrare saeramentaEN22 does not stand idly and superfluously alongside the pure doeere evangeliumEN23• The sacraments are the special witness to the actuality of this event. They, too, of course, can only bear witness to it. They cannot themselves, as on the Roman Catholic view,effect it as a "means of grace," in contradistinction to the word of the preacher. What they do do is to bear witness to a truth which they can attest more effectively than the preacher's word, because by nature they are not words again, but actions. This is the truth that what the preacher saysis not merely said from one man to his fellows, but that it exists inJesus Christ, and, just because it exists inJesus Christ, it is spoken with all the strength of participation in this being inJesus Christ. If this witness of the sacraments is taken seriously, then the qualification in regard to doctrine will not imply resignation or weakness. The strength of doctrine will arise preci~elyfrom the fact that, without itself being a sacrament in the narrower sense of the term, it can refer to the sacraments as the testimony of the action instituted byJesus Christ, the testimony to the existence of that which, as doctrine, it can merely state. It is, of course, to be observed that, in the customary mode of Evangelical worship and therefore in the Evangelical Churches generally, this, so to speak, natural strength of doctrine in its relation to the sacraments is hindered in effectiveness, and perhaps altogether neutralised, by the fact that the administration of the sacrament does not constitute the rule, but has become a solemn exception to the rule. Perhaps one of the decisive questions which will be put to Protestantism in the near future is whether it can succeed in restoring to Evangelical worship the wholeness intended by both Luther and Calvin, i.e., whether it can overcome the meaningless divorce of preaching and sacrament and re-establish the natural relationship between them. But it will mean only that we are trying to overcome one evil by a greater if we maintain the divorce, but ignore the qualification to which doctrine as such is subject, thus giving to preaching the character of a direct communication. This is something which can be attributed neither to. preaching nor to the sacrament, but both-effectively, of course, only in combination-are intended to serve it, because it is the work of God Himself.

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Pure Doctrine as the Problem of Dogmatics

Doctrine means teaching, instruction, edification, institutioEN24• It is this function which Christian preaching has to perform. But its instruction is intended for the man called to hear the Word of God. And its task is to instruct him in hearing the Word of God. We remember, of course, that to speak God's Word, and cause it to be heard, is and remains God's concern. It is entrusted to the Church. The Church is engaged in this ministry. It has the duty of preaching in human words the Word of God. It is therefore true that in the performance of this duty human words become the Word of God Himself. But we still cannot say intelligently, if it is a question of understanding the task of these human words as a human task, that in this ministry man has to declare to others the Word of God, to instruct others in the Word of God. For this is the content of the divine promise. Therefore it cannot as such be the content of the human task. It cannot be a description of what man has actually to do. In the performance of this task man can and must attempt to interpret revelation, or concretely the biblical witness of revelation, in the form of a testimony to its truth given to him as his own. Therefore, because what he himself does can as such only be an attempt, it will point beyond itself. When he turns to his hearers and desires to be heard by them, his concern will not be that they should hear himself, the human speaker, but that they should hear Him whose witness the human speaker is. The aim of his discourse will be that others together with him should hear God speak, that they should, as it were, be his fellow pupils in the school of God, or more exactly, the school of Holy Scripture. All that he says about God will be informed and determined by his own hearing of the Word of God. In the last analysis, therefore, it will not consist in the impartation of the material given in this way, even though it is the best scriptural exposition. Rather, under the guise of imparting this objective material, it will be an attempt to incite and inspire the hearers to hear for themselves what the Word of God, in the interpretation which it gives of itself, has to say to them. It will be, therefore, an attempt to put before them, in a kind of exemplary fashion, the movement of faith responding to God's revelation. The aim of all the indirectness with which the Church in its own proper authority and freedom grasps and expounds the Word is the directness ofrevelation which becomes real, and the directness of faith which becomes alive, at the point where God in His authority and freedom has Himself spoken and is Himselfheard. It can only aim at this end; but it can do so and must do so, in so far as it is the indirectness of the Church which is itself rooted in faith-the Church which knows itself to be called in faith to service, but to service in the strict sense of the term. Hence it becomes apparent how appropriate it is that the problem of Christian preaching should be discussed under the concept of pure doctrine. If the human word of Christian preaching is to perform the service of leading to the EN~4

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hearing of God's Word, it must obviously have the quality of creating obedience to the Word of God, as it is itself obedient. It must be a selfless human word, a human word which will not say this or that in a spirit of self-assertion, but devote itself only to letting God's own Word say what mu~t be said. Like a window, it must be a transparent word; or like a mirror, a reflecting word. The more it repudiates and rejects anything which might intervene asa third element between God's Word and the human hearer, the less it obtrudes itself in its own solidity between God and the hearer, the more it is positively an indication, pointer and compulsion to hearing the Word of God itself, and negatively a hushing of all the possible notes of false idolatry and human exaltation-the better it will.be. And this is just what is to be understood by purity of doctrine. We 'may be permitted to remind ourselves at this point that in mediaeval art a frame of clear cut glass was used for symbolic pictures of the Virgin. This was an implied allusion to Lk. 138: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word. " We may also recall Mt. 2639: "Not as I will, but as thou wilt." It is pure vessels like this which the divine Logos seeks, creates and finds in the proclamation of the Church as well. The idea of "orthodoxy" even when one interprets it in optimam partemEN25, fails to give the exact meaning of what is intended by "pure doctrine." Orthodoxy means correct opinion. In the problem of Christian preaching it is not merely a question of correct opinion, but of the right kind of teaching. And far more unequivocally than "correct" or "right," the term "pure" denotes the required medial or ministerial character of Christian preaching.

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All that we have said concerning the authority and freedom of the Word of God and the authority and freedom of the Church, and our fundamental characterisation of the relation between the divine and human words in Christian preaching, clearly compels us to define the essential character, principles and problem of Christian preaching in this way: that it is what it ought to be and can be if in this sense it is pure doctrine. But if preaching ought to be pure doctrine, pure doctrine can also be understood as a significant characterisation of the objective of what we can do. We can eitherknow or not know this characterisation. We, can either care about it or not. We can know and care about it in a better way or a worse. We can adopt specific measures and employ specific means to approach nearer this goal. We can suggest specific standards by which it may be estimated whether and to what extent Christian preaching is or is not orientated towards this goal. In brief, the normative concept of pure doctrine required by the promise of the presence and activity of the Word of God characterises Christian preaching, at any rate in so far as this is also the content of a concrete human action distinguished from other human activities with at any rate the relative independence which cannot allow the Church to regard itself as being relieved and replaced by other human activities in state and society. This characterisation of the goal applies only to the Church's action. EN25

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Pure Doctrine as the Problem of Dogmatics

In all this we do not affirm that pure doctrine is only or decisively a matter of human direction, work and effort. We do not say it in any sense in respect of its realisation. How can we? It is only in view of the fact that God Himself speaks His Word in the proclamation of the Church that we can in any sense set up this criterion of pure doctrine, that is, of the human word completely yielding itself to the divine Word. And if it comes to pass that Christian preaching is pure doctrine in this sense, it will not be the result of human attainment and merit but of the grace of the Word of God, which in fulfilment of His promise is pleased to acknowledge, and has acknowledged, the human word, and has thus itself provided for the necessary purity of this human word. Therefore, it is not the case that the Church only needs the good work of pure doctrine, i.e., what we accomplish on these lines, what we think we can, to the best of our belief and conscience, consider a satisfactory performance, and where this is present God will be compelled, as it were, to acknowledge with His Word the human word so well and purely spoken by us. Even where there is the most serious effort and performance in the matter of pure doctrine, it will always be the result of God's free grace if He does acknowledge our words in this way, and we do well to remember that even the best and sincerest accomplishment of the Church in this respect is, in fact, in need of God's grace. Again, therefore, it is not the case that God's Word may not and cannot recognise even preaching which according to all that we can know in such things we must condemn as supremely impure doctrine, as a medium distorted and spoilt by so many alien elements. Is not the Church completely lost if the grace of the Word of God is not at all points mightier than the weakness of man prevalent at all points, ifit is not free to be reflected also in what are, humanly speaking, very tarnished mirrors? We can all take comfort in the fact-and may this consideration have due weight with us when we are inclined to judge the performances of others-that in spite of the impurity of the word with which it seeks to serve the Word of God, the Church cannot place obstacles in the way of the power and grace of this Word or set limits to its operation. Yet all that cannot and ought not to alter the fact that pure doctrine is a task which faces us, and that we are required to have an acquaintance with it and a concern for it. The grace of the Word of God is not magic. It is promised to the Church that is required and ready to serve it. If it makes strong what men make weak, good what men make evil, pure what men make impure, that does not mean that it does everything where men do simply nothing, where men perhaps do not stand under this requirement and in this readiness. When we have done all that was required of us, we must add that we are unprofitable servants. But if we infer from this that we might equally well allow ourselves to be idle servants, we are not trusting in the grace of the Word of God. When we do trust in it, we stand under the law of the Word of God which is laid upon the Church; we are active in its service (without the presumption of trying to compel its operation, or the folly of trying to see in its presence our own success). We are, therefore, anxious and eager for the purity of the Christian preaching which is to be

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performed in its service. We know that the effective realisation of this purity of doctrine will always be the result of divine grace. But just because we subject ourselves to the law of divine grace, this purity will always determine the goal of our human activity, the object of our effort and concern. If it is so only in virtue of the grace by which we are called to the Church and its ministry, we withdraw from this grace if we try to be anywhere but in the Church and its ministry, and therefore without eagerness and anxiety for the purity of doctrine. We have now reached the point where the task of dogmatics again comes under consideration. It is in concretoEN26 the effort and concern of the Church for the purity of its doctrine. Its problem is essentially the problem of Christian preaching. At this point we might quite justifiably speak of theology as such' and as a whole, that is, of the unity of biblical, dogmatic and practical theology. And in this unity there is certainly no question of precedence. Yet there is in it, as in the Holy Trinity, and not as a sum of the whole, a concrete centre which is constituted by dogmatics. In biblical theology it is a question of the foundation, in practical theology a question of the form, but in dogmatic theologyin the transition from the one to the other-a question of the content of Church preaching, its agreement with the revelation attested in Scripture. These three theological tasks are completely, or almost completely, implicated in each other, so that none can be even correctly seen and defined without the other. Yet the distinction between them arises inevitably from the practical application of the distinction which has compelled our attention in the doctrine of freedom under the Word (~ 212 3-5): observation (explicatio), assimilation (applicatio) and between the two the transition formed by reflection on the Word spoken to us in the biblical witness to revelation. We have seen how the true decision with regard to the right hearing of the Word of God in the Church is made in this reflection. To this reflection corresponds dogmatics, as the theological task which along with exegetical and practical theology is laid upon the Church in its mission and proclamation. But reflection does not take place in the void. It takes place at the central, transitional point between explicatio and applicatio, between the sensusEN27 and the usus scripturaeEN28• In the same way, dogmatics arises only at the central and transitional point between exegetical and practical theology. But it is at this central and transitional point between the question of the origin and that of the method of Christian proclamation that there obviously emerges the really critical theological question, that of its actual content. When the Church asks this question, when it submits to the critical inquiry concerning what it preaches and will preach-honestly and without prejudice, as though it does not yet know EN26 EN27 EN28

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Pure Doctrine as the Problem of Dogmatics

what it has to preach-its concern is for the purity of its doctrine (in so far as men can concern themselves in this matter), and therefore for the right fulfilment of the service incumbent upon it. How can it put this question of content without realising that the only source from which it can learn the answer is Holy Scripture? How, then, can there be dogmatics unless exegesis not only precedes but is included in it? And, again, how can this question be asked except in view of the proclamation laid upon the Church? How, then, can there be dogmatics unless practical theology, too, not only follows but is already included in it? All the same, it is here that we obviously find ourselves at the central point of the path leading from the .one to the other, and therefore at the real centre of theology as a whole. The question: who and what sort of a hearer of the Word of God is the man who has so observed the testimony to revelation as to make it his own, is one which is decided in his reflection. Similarly, it is in dogmatics that there lies the decisive answer to the question about the service which theology as an ancillary has to perform in and for the Church. And because, humanly speaking, it is essential for the ministry of the Church that it concerns itself about the purity of its doctrine, that it accepts gratefully the help of theology, therefore-again humanly speaking-the question of the Church's ministry is decided in dogmatics. Bad dogmaticsbad theology-bad preaching. And, conversely: good dogmatics-good theology-good preaching. The suspicion and reproach of hybris seem unavoidable when we put it in this way. Therefore let us remember-not in defence but in explanation of the statement-that the grace of the Word of God alone decides concerning the good or bad quality of the Church and its ministry. But if it is true that the grace of the Word of God is the grace which claims the Church for this ministry, setting it in action and therefore making it concerned and zealous about the purity of its doctrine, then it is not apparent how we are to avoid the inference that the decision which is exclusively a matter of God's free grace is made in preaching and therefore (because preaching is impossible without answering these three questions) in theology, and therefore (because the central one of these three questions is the really critical one) in dogmatics. In this connexion, when we speak of dogmatics we do not, of course, think of the work of this or that professor, but of the working out of this central question concerning the content of Church proclamation, in so far as the subject of this labour is the whole Church without excepting even a single one of its members. We think of the labour, the scientific form of which can constitute only its most obvious feature. If such an endeavour to attain pure doctrine is really laid upon the Church as its duty, it cannot spare itself any effort in this matter. It cannot, then, escape the conclusion that it must regard and treat the work of dogmatics as its most essential task. Next, we must emphasise the fact that in dogmatics it is really a question of the fulfilment of a task. If by the grace of the Word of God it happens that the human word of Christian preaching is pure doctrine, it does not happen in a static situation, but as an action of faith and obedience, an action of the Holy

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Ghost in the Church. Pure doctrine is a deed, not a thing-not even a matter of thoughts and words. Therefore pure doctrine is not identical with anyexisting text-whether it is that of specific theological formulae, or that of a specific theological system; or that of the Church's creed, or even the text of the Bible. Pure doctrine is an event. It is the same with the proclamation of the Church as with revelation and Holy Scripture. We have seen that revelation as God's Word is the unity of the act of incarnation and of the outpouring of the Holy Ghost. And we have seen that Holy Scripture as God's Word is the unity of the act of God's speaking to the prophets and apostles and through them to the Church. So the proclamation of the Church is God's Word as the unity of the life-giving act in which the Church hears and speaks. At all these points, especially the second and the third, the older Protestantism of the 17th century fell into the error of splitting up the unity of this act and regarding it synergistically, with an objective divine giving on the one hand, and on the other a subjective human taking and assimilating. In this way,Scripture especially became for it an inspired text, as did also doctrine as the norm of the Church's proclamation. And the result (for we cannot trifle with synergism) was to prepare the way for what was least of all desired, viz. the transformation of the authority and freedom of the Word of God into the very human authority and freedom of those who thought they held the Word of God in the form of these texts, and in that opinion quite consistently went on more and more to control it.

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Pure doctrine as the fulfilment of the promise given to Church proclamation is an event. It is the event of the grace of the Word of God and of the obedience of faith created by this grace. It is a divine gift which is only given to the Church as it is both given to it and received by it. Here, too, it is impossible to abstract the divine reality of the Holy Spirit from the prayer for the Holy Spirit in which it is acknowledged and accepted as a divine reality. Just for this reason pure doctrine, in so far as it is the appointed goal of human action in the Church, must be clearly understood as a task, a piece of work which faces us. It cannot in any sense be thought of as a solution already existing somewhere or other, which can quite simply be taken over as such. A simple appropriation of this kind cannot possibly be the business of dogmatics when it is understood as the attempt of the Church to achieve purity of doctrine. Where else can it begin, of course, except with the investigation of the texts of the Bible, or the Church's confession, and of all the perception which has gone to make it? But it only begins with this investigation. There is far more to italready it is a matter of reflection-than merely the repetition of those texts. But, again, it cannot aim at the production of a new sacred text, however unavoidable it may be that its work should find its outcome in the production of specific texts, in sentences, formulae, sequences of thought, systems of ideas. All these things will have an intelligible purpose, and be intelligently received, only if they are intended and understood as milestones on the way,as a provisional outline, and as a proposal for further thought. All the conclusions of dogmatics must be intended, accepted and understood as fluid material for further work. None of the results of dogmatics-really none at all-can be important. The only important thing is the activity of the Church, denoted

2.

Pure Doctrine as the Problem of Dogmatics

by the results so far attained, in its striving for purity of doctrine. Whatever stimulates, maintains and guides this activity is good dogmatics; whatever checks it, lulling the Church into a comfortable sleep, is certainly bad dogmatics, even when the texts it reproduces or itself originates are in themselves excellent. To teach dogmatics does not therefore mean-however unavoidable it may be that this should also take place incidentally-merely to repeat certain traditional principles, to lay down some new ones, to sketch and explain a specific view of Christian matters, to outline and present a system. While all this does happen more or less inevitably, it really means to take up the Church's work in the direction of pure doctrine, to advance it and deepen it, to carry it out in a new period in the face of new problems. And therefore to study dogmatics certainly and unavoidably means to acquaint oneself with the principles, formulae and systems taught, handed down or re-shaped in previous dogmatic teaching (because without this acquaintance it is impossible to enter oneself into the work which has to be done). But beyond this preliminary acquaintance, the really important studereEN29 consists in participating in the work itself, to which all the results attained are intended only to stimulate. It consists in an active concern for the question of pure dogma in which gratitude for previous dogmatic teaching is no constraint on independence.

Before turning to a general description of this work, we have to make some further delimitations. The task of dogmatics is not identical with the task of proclamation. In both cases it is a question of pure doctrine. In concretoEN30 dogmatics can be preaching and preaching dogmatics. The two are basically inseparable. But, as so often in theological reflection, they have to be distinguished. They have to be distinguished in just the same way as the right thought which necessarily precedes every right deed has to be differentiated from the deed itself. They differ in exactly the same way as learning and teaching differ: Oportet enim episcopos now tantum docere, sed et discere, quia et ille melius docet, qui cotidie crescit et proficit discendo melioraEN31 (Cyprian, Ep. 74, 10). With due reserve we may say that they differ just as in war the home front and base differ from the front itself. Whether the war at the front is won or lost, what happens at home and behind the lines will be not merely incidentally but decisively connected with what happens at the front itself. It is only per nefasEN32 that the two aspects can be separated.

We may well expect, therefore, that dogmatics will furnish the necessary preparation for preaching. We may expect from it instruction in the search for pure doctrine, and practice in this search. But we must not expect it to replace this search and to make it superfluous. Proclamation as the pure doctrine of the Word of God will not take place without reflection. But it will not become real in reflection, but through the effective operation of the grace of the Word EN29 EN~~O EN31

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of God. It will become real in the narrow defile between the testimony to biblical revelation on the one side and the Church and the present-day world on the other. The Church's task at this point is not so much to examine itself and prove its capacity to speak about God. This self-examination is a basis. Not for a single moment is it exempt from it. For that reason it is at the heart of the narrow defile of this self-examination that it fulfils its real task, which is really to speak about God. It is in the thick of the Church's life, i.e., as the hearing Church has to be a teaching Church, that the decision about the purity or impurity of its doctrine is made: in its preaching and instruction, in its pastoral work, in its administration of the sacraments, in its worship, in the discipline which. it exercises towards its members, in its message to the world, and last and not least in its concrete attitude over against state and society. Dogmatics, too, does, of course, belong to this life of the Church. But it cannot replace what must become a reality in other aspects of the Church's life. In its own place it can only help to prepare it. In relation to this other characteristic service of the Church, and to what happens or does not happen in that narrow defile, it is the auxiliary of the Church. As such it must be taken seriously-as seriously as the indissoluble unity of reflection and action requires. As this auxiliary it must have its effect on the whole life of the Church. It cannot concede that there' are any adiaphoraEN33• It cannot allow even the slightest responsible expression of the Church's life to escape its control. And in this capacity, it cannot remain only the business of theology, or even academic theology. On the contrary, it must be the concern of the whole Church. If pure doctrine is sought in dogmatics, the same will certainly happen in the other departments of the Church's life. If it does not happen here, then it will certainly not happen elsewhere.

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It is not superfluous at least to recall the opposite truth that the task of proclamation cannot be identical with that of dogmatics. The Church pursues dogmatics in order that its preachers may know what they have to say-yet not in order that they may say what they know as dogmaticians, but what they know as preachers. The knowledge of the preacher must be derived exclusively from the biblical witness to revelation. Dogmatics must teach him how to extract from this source pure doctrine. Because he is only a man, this does not go without saYing.It must be for him a matter of prayer and also of work. Dogmatics ought to have placed in his hands the knowledge of a standard for all doctrine, and to have taught him and continually to teach him to apply it. He does not have to preach this knowledge. He has to preach on the presupposition of this knowledge, in application and under the control of it. It is not necessary to state in detail how frequently error has occurred, both in the past and present, by deplorably confusing this necessary discipline and its special ends wi(h the aim which this discipline and its special ends are there to serve.

The special task of dogmatics implies that it is the place where, as nowhere else, theology comes into its own. But this situation has a two-edged character of which we ought to be aware. We have said that the work of dogmatics arises at the middle point between that of exegetical and that of practical theology. EN33

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Pure Doctrine as the Problem of Dogmatics

This means, on the one hand, that theology can exercise itself at this point in a certain security and independence, which is not self-evident elsewhere, but peculiar to it by reason of this middle position. Behind it theology has Holy Scripture as witness to revelation, and its attestation in the earlier confessions and knowledge of the Church. Before it, it has the Church and its activity of proclamation. Thus placed, theology can reveal, unfold and shape itself in dogmatics as a characteristic branch of knowledge. It can do so all the more, the more strictly it stands in this twofold relation and avails itself of the fact that here it is held, nourished and protected in this twofold way.When it asks concerning the content of the Church's proclamation in this sphere and framework, it is confronted by a whole world of problems, each of which is so rich and fruitful because we cannot seriously treat a single one of them without immediately having to treat the one central problem in a new and special way; for there is no real periphery, but each peripheral point immediately becomes another centre. And the details, too, form themselves automatically into a whole, the unity of which we do not merely surmise but also perceive, and then again merely surmise and fail to perceive. And, again, the more definitely we are placed within this sphere and framework, the more conversant we become with the details as such and with their cosmic totality as such: the more reason there is to be astounded, on the one hand, at the complete freedom with which we can work in every question of method, order or sequence of thought, apparently according to the peculiar disposition and talents of each individual worker, and, on the other hand, at the utter impossibility of arbitrariness either in approach or in the basic design, which the very nature of the thing determines. To engage in theology seriously means-and this in proportion to the seriousness with which the task is undertaken-to awaken as a theologian to scientific self-consciousness. It is still not so very long since dogmatics was felt to be the great embarrassment of a scientific theology. But that was the time when theology in the precise sense had no scientific self-consciousness, but regarded it as necessary and possible laboriously to nourish itself by borrowing, first from philosophy, and then above all from history. It was a time when the middle position occupied by dogmatics and theology between Scripture and the proclamation of the Church was hidden from theologians themselves. Exegesis threatened to be dissolved in Church history, and practical theology in a collection of more or less arbitrarily chosen and imparted bits of technical advice. The two branches were linked, or rather not linked, by a dash of psychological speculation to which in the end there was a justifiable hesitation even to give the name of dogmatics. There was good ground for the bad conscience and dissatisfaction with which dogmatics was then pursued among other theological disciplines and especially other sciences. But if other theological disciplines thought they could bring a better conscience and greater satisfaction to bear upon their problems, this was only in appearance. Without the middle point of an orderly dogmatics to hold them together, they were, if possible, even more in the air than was dogmatics itself in its then disorderly condition. The good order of dogmatics, and therefore of theology generally, stands or falls by whether it consciously and consistently places itself within this framework. When it does so it receives both poise and movement, freedom and strictness in its work, a clear survey of its possibilities and also a clear insight into the secret of its limitations. When

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it does so, we can again understand what the mediaeval theologians meant when they did not only sigh at the toil but also rejoiced in the beauty (pulchritudo) of their work. When it does so, there arises a genuine and not simply surreptitious self-consciousness of exegetical and practical theology too. Again, when it does so, and only when it does so, we can understand the independence of a study of Church history as distinct from secular history. When it does so, theology can confront calmly the questions put to it by other branches of knowledge in regard to its scientific character, turning to them with the counter-question, whether in the whole of university learning it is possible to think, teach and speak with equal freedom and necessity as in theology; whether theology is not still perhaps the true and basic science from which the whole universitas literarum EN34 has not only derived historically, but to which it can only return, in so far as scientific self-awareness has there its true and original foundation. Let there be no deception: it is only as theology does in fact take up its midway position between the Bible and the Church, only in virtue of this position, that all this is possible. The time of theology's internal disintegration and external impotence and shame will inevitably recur the moment this position is again forgotten or abandoned, instead of being maintained still more strictly than has been possible in the short interval which separates us from the time of which we speak.

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But there is another aspect to the fact that in dogmatics, as nowhere else, theology comes into its own. For it undoubtedly involves a real burden and temptation, which we must also consider. It is not, of course, an accident that all the complaints and objections which arise both in the world and in the Church itself against theology are always aimed directly or indirectly at dogmatics. What does this mean? Is it not the case that the security and independence with which theology can be pursued in this middle position carry with them a relative impregnability for those who pursue it, that they are not immediately exposed, like the biblical theologian, to the direct assault of Holy Scripture, or, like the practical theologian, to the direct assault of the congregation and the world, that they are, indeed, contained and limited on both sides (and, it is to be hoped, most emphatically contained and limited), but that as the transition is there made from explicatioEN35 to applicatioEN36, they are implicated in the necessary process of the reflection which both assimilates and then in the movement to applicatioEN37 utilises? It is, of course, on this razor's edge that dogmatics appears in all its splendour as the central theological discipline, and we can never rate that splendour too highly. Here or nowhere, there awakes the self-awareness of the critical theologian. But how can this situation fail to be critical, two-edged and even actually dangerous? We are confronted immediately by the question whether that suspicion is not justified with which even in the Church .itself the question is asked: What kind of abstraction and aloofness from life is this, in which dogmatics and therefore theology seems to move? Where are we really led by the innumerable formal reflections, distinctions and limitations, and all the indissolubly connected EN34 EN35 EN36 EN37

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objections and negations, in which theology issues at this point? Is not the Bible much simpler than dogmatics? Is it not therefore possible and necessary that preaching and teaching should be much simpler? Must this middle course really be traversed? Are not unnecessary refinemeI?-ts and difficulties artificially introduced only at a later stage to be just as artificially resolved? Is there not at work in the practised analysis and synthesis a strong vein of humanistic aesthetics, which has no connexion with the seriousness of the Church's theological task? The temptation offered by such questions is twofold. It is certainly not a good thing arrogantly to exclude the probability that the open or tacit reproaches which such questions imply do always contain a particula veriEN38• To the extent that in this middle position a man is really concerned with himself instead of with his subject-matter, to the extent that he works himself out in this position, it is undoubtedly a misfortune, for speculations alien to the life of Scripture and the Church hold the attention, and these can only be aggravated by the natural brilliance of dogmatic activity, which in this case will immediately become unnatural. As dogmaticians, we continually have to put the question whether, in the whole of our work, we are not more concerned with ourselves than with the subject-matter. This question will have to be asked the more urgently in proportion as we may feel our work to be successful. But, again, it is wrong if the questions suggested by this mistrust are allowed to alienate us from the task in hand, that task which is laid upon us in the middle position between the Bible and the Church, of critical and systematic reflection with a view to the discovery of pure doctrine. Dogmatics has not to be ashamed of its task as a discipline, its scholastic task. The reproaches may spring from inadequate insight into the seriousness and scope of this task. They may be philistine in character. Therefore we should not allow ourselves to be misled by them. We should treat them with friendly unconcern. Often enough there lies concealed behind them the error which has penetrated into the Church and which scents out in dogmatics its natural adversary. Often enough apparent simplicity is not merely complexity and sophistication, but also downright falsehood, which fears to be unmasked by dogmatics. And where this is the case dogmatics has even less occasion to allow itself to be confused by heckling from this source, and so diverted from its post. But at this point a further question arises, for as dogmatics effects the transition from the Bible to preaching, and constitutes it by its own human reflection, it provides the occasion, as we have already seen in ~ 21 2, on which the question of the relation between theology and philosophy becomes a burning issue. Is it not inevitable that at this point, where it seems that theology is no longer thinking and speaking exegetically and not yet practically, philosophy will present itself with instruction how critical and systematic thought is to be carried on in this process of transition? Is it not inevitable that in its suggestions-the suggestions which the theologian makes to himself in his capacity EN:\H

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as a philosopher-the significant fact will again emerge that it is in dogmatics that the theologian can most easily lay an unauthorised emphasis on self? This is the classical point for the invasion of alien powers, the injection ofmetaphysical systems which are secretly in conflict with the Bible and the Church. And where this has taken place, it has only separated the Bible and the Church, and after lending to dogmatics a certain false independence, it has caused its disintegration and that of theology generally, at first inwardly and very soon outwardly as well. If the complaints about the aloofness and abstraction of dogmatics from life are justified, if in this matter man is more concerned about himself than his subject, then the reason or the effect will almost always be found in some such interpenetration. We must note again that there is a real source of danger at this point. When theology, as it were, snatches away the biblical word in order to press .it into the framework of a scheme of thought which it has already prepared and regards as absolute, and to pass it on in this form to the preaching of the Church, then no matter what the scheme may be, the evil has already been committed, that is, the corruption of doctrine, which it is the task of theology, and of dogmatics at this middle point of theology, to prevent. The keeper himself has opened the gate to the enemy. The contingency needs only to be described to tell us that this isjust what must not be allowed to happen. But, again, the opposite temptation must also be resisted. In dogmatics, personal schemes of thought must be shaped in accordance with the word of the Bible, which is now to become the word of the Church, and not conversely. There can never be any question of opposing them to the word of the Bible, as, so to speak, stable elements; nor can there ever be any question in dogmatics of maintaining such a scheme, however necessary and useful it may be, as a norm over against the preaching of the Church. But, again, it is not right to allow a fear of this interpretation, and therefore of the possible corruption of doctrine, to arrest human thinking, as it is no doubt controlled by the criterion of a philosophy, and with it the work of criticism and systematisation which it has to perform. It cannot be good counsel to let an ascetic abstinence prevail at this point, because in practice this can only mean putting aside the work that has to be done here. It is quite wrong, of course, that at this point man should give rein to the arbitrariness of his thought and the philosopher prevail over the theologian. But it is even _ more wrong that at this point where he is challenged in his whole existence and therefore as a theological philosopher too, man should withdraw and refuse from fear of sin or of being suspected of sin, and should then pass from thinking to not thinking or to an idle and frivolous type of thinking. So long as dogmatics has heeded the warning, it can and must go forward in this respect too with a good conscience. We now attempt briefly to outline its general task. Even the work of dogmatics can begin only with the hearing of the Word of God, and indeed the hearing of it in the proclamation of the Church. It, too, proceeds from the expectation and the claim which this proclamation arouses, that the human 32

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word which is heard may be not only man's word, but God's own Word. Apart from this presupposition, it has no contribution to make, and the questions which it has to put, the criticism which it has to exercise and the counsels which it has to offer will be without root, object and meaning. The sphere in which it thinks and speaks does not lie outside but inside the Church. It does not think and speak, therefore, by ignoring but by acknowledging the promise given to the Church. For that reason it must not approach the preaching of the Church in a mood of distrust, as though the pure doctrine, about which it asks and concerns itself, cannot become a reality. The attitude of dogmatics towards Church proclamation must be critical, but it may not be sceptically negative. In spite of all the objections and scruples which it has to bring forward, in spite of all the changes, however significant, which it has to propose, it must proceed in the confidence that God's Word has never left itselfwithout a witness in the Church, and will never do so. It will listen, expecting to hear pure doctrine and therefore not merely man's word but God's Word. It will listen to the Church's preaching, as listening in faith demands. In this way it will try to hear what the Church has to say about God to the world to-day in the whole scope of its activities. But just because of this presupposition it will listen critically. It will bear in mind the other presupposition that those who speak of God are men, that what happens is a matter of the ministry and liturgy of the Church which cannot as such be perfect and unassailable like the Word of God itself, but which by the Word of God, or, from the human point of view, by prayer and the work of the Church, always has to become what it is. For the Church to which this promise is given, and the preaching of which it therefore approaches with this first presupposition in mind, is undoubtedly a Church of sinners. If dogmatics is particularly concerned with the work which from the Church point of view must be done in order that its divine worship may be divine worship not merely in form and appearance but in reality, then it cannot be sufficiently emphasised that this work cannot be properly done except in so far as the dogmatic theologian both assigns to prayer a much more important place in the solution of the problems confronting him, and also himself participates in the prayer of the Church for the correctness of its liturgy and the purity of its doctrine. About this, little need be said. The truth is that the quality of dogmatic work depends decisively on its not consisting, for example, merely in a series of conceptual manipulations, but on its being penetrated down to its last and apparently least important details by an unceasing supplication for the Holy Spirit, who is both for the purposes of the Church and for His own sake the unum necessarium EN39 which no technique nor toil can compel, but for which we can only pray. We have already seen, however, that the insight that the Church must pray for pure doctrine will not be deep and sincere, ifit does not stimulate it to the EN:\9

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utmost exertion and set all its activity in motion. If from a human standpoint the preaching of the Church is sick, for it is the preaching of sinful men, and if it can be healed only by the divine physician, it cannot avoid facing the question which is put to it inJn. 56 by the divine physician Himself: Wilt thou be made whole? As a human action, Christian preaching has to face concrete human questions even as it stands under the divine promise and is seen under this promise. It does not have to face any kind of human questions. It does not have to face such questions as arise from the desire of the Church to be the Church, or such questions as may entice it to cease to be the Church. It can take note of such questions only as questions which are already answered and superseded by what it has to say. Only as such can it take them up and pay attention to them in what it goes on to say. The task of dogmatics cannot, therefore, be to assume the part of the advocatus diaboliEN40, putting such questions to the Church from a general view of truth or reality. On the contrary, it will have the duty of warning the Church about the character of such questions. It will have to instruct and show it how to treat such questions as ques~ tions already answered and therefore superseded. But there are some human questions. facing Christian preaching which necessarily arise from the being of the Church as the Church and which do, therefore, have to be put: questions regarding the greater or less purity of its doctrine, its greater or less suitability for the service of the Word of God. Wherever the Church's proclamation takes place there is at a first glance in its performance an apparently inextricable dialectic of obedience and self-assertion, consistency and weakening, decisiveness and obscurity, concentration and distraction. This does not mean that purity of doctrine is necessarily absent; but it does mean that it is compromised and threatened. And even the slightest menace to pure doctrine is a serious and fatal menace to Christian preaching and the Christian Church as such. Even behind the most insignificant deviation or obscurity or irrelevance, behind the apparently most harmless whimsicality, which someone or some circumstance may wish to employ in matters of Church proclamation, there may lurk the error and falsehood by which the promise is annulled and the Church destroyed. In every menace to pure doctrine the question arises whether the Church, at the point where it now speaks, has not perhaps rejected grace and is, therefore, itself rejected. In our prayer for the Holy Ghost we commit it to the grace of God, and in so doing we confess that it needs divine grace, and must be continually rescued from death if it is to live. And if we believe in its deliverance from error and falsehood and therefore from rejection and reprobation, if we believe quod una ecclesiaperpetuo mansura sitEN41, necessarily the questions which we have to put to its preaching in view of that dialectical process will be impelled by'ihe thought of its need, which it is certainly the business of prayer for the Holy Ghost to overcome. Therefore EN40 EN41

devil's advocate that there will be one holy church in perpetuity

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the questions which have to be put to the Church's preaching because they spring from the essential nature of the Church as the Church, the questions which find expression in dogmatics, will never be merely preliminary, formal or supplementary. Certainly dogmatics cannot ask concerning the absolute purity of doctrine-for it is not the work of man, but of God to produce this. It can ask only concerning the greater or less degree of purity. Even on the relative level of the Church's human work it cannot make decisions with regard to the Church's creed. It can do so only in matters arising out of the creed and its repetition. Yet at the same time it cannot be concealed and denied that its questions will not be questions of style, or taste, or feeling, or debatable opinion, but questions in which in some way and in greater or less degree what is at stake is always the life or death, the being or not-being of the Church. This is why in dogmatics there are, strictly speaking, no subordinate questions. Listening always in the confidence that it has to do with the one Word of God, it alw~yshas to put the question whether it really has to do with the one Word of God. From this combination of confidence and criticism arises the seriousness of dogmatic questions. Neither must be lacking. Confidence without criticism becomes a profane and forbidden confidence-the false self-confidence of ecclesiasticism. Criticism without confidence becomes a profane and forbidden criticism, the anticipation of divine judgment and the criticism of unbelief. On neither supposition can the questions of dogmatics be serious. All the questions of dogmatics have fundamentally the same direction. The purity of doctrine is the issue, and therefore it is a question whether the words, the phrases, the sequences of thought, the logical construction of Christian preaching have or have not the quality of serving the Word of God and becoming transparent for it. We have to emphasise that it is the words, phrases, sequences of thought and logical construction which are our concern here. It is not, therefore, a question whether something has been omitted in Christian preaching. It is much rather a question whether something has been done in it, but rightly done. It is quite understandable that both in earlier times and to-day it could be proposed and the attempt made to achieve pure doctrine quickly, by either silencing the human word entirely, or accompanying it with silence, or by destroying its verbal and so its rational character in an attempt to express it in the speech of primitive poetry. This kind of silence was interpreted as the completest way of letting God speak, and it was thought to be better than speech, and to be what was really meant and intended in speech. Where there is a desire to replace or crowd out preaching by the sacrament and liturgy, no small part is usually played by the theme that pure doctrine is the result of doing nothing, of abstention from human words, which fall under the suspicion of being so solid that they cannot have the transparency required to reveal the Word of God. But the matter is not so simple. That any sort of human words have the required transparency is certainly not the case. But silence is also a human action, as is everything that man does instead of preaching. Even the one thing which does have a place alongside the human word of the preacher, not to displace it, but together with it to constitute the Word of God, is still a human action-namely, the sacrament. And if the sacrament itself is not intended or suited to effect magically what the

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human word cannot effect magically, this is even less true of an effectual or symbolic silence or any other arbitrarily chosen substitute for the human word. We can, therefore, take note of all proposals of this kind only as attempts to master the real difficulty which cannot possibly succeed, since they are made with inadequate means.

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When purity of doctrine is demanded, what is required is not abstention from, but full use of human words, phrases, sequences of thought and logical construction. It is not by their negation, but in their reality, that they are to be pure and transparent. It is demanded that they should serve the Word of God, and therefore cause God's Word to be heard and not man's. Thus the criticism of dogmatics is turned upon them. It both takes them seriously and invites the preaching of the Church to take them seriously, just because it believes in the Church's promise and mission, and in the necessity which demands teaching, but pure teaching, in the Church. Dogmatics asks on what grounds the Church speaks in this way or that, and whether and how far the manner in which it speaks corresponds to these grounds and is or is not, therefore, meaningful. Thus it goes back beyond what is said to what is meant. It seeks to elucidate this and ultimately to correct it. It then returns to what is actually said in order to enquire about its suitability and finally to bring forward proposals for its amendment. . Ifwe ask concerning the subject matter of dogmatics, the reply must be that it consists essentially in the totality of what it hears from the Church-the contemporary Church-as its human speech about God. In practice, however, it will consist in certain key-words and fundamental outlines which. in this heterogeneous mass c9nstitute that which is common to the whole and recurs in all its multiple forms. However searchingly the critical inquiry into pure doctrine must be conducted, the fact of such common and rec,:!rrent features justifies us from the start in the corresponding faith (without which we cannot approach this task) that what. the Church says about God is not just crude material without a pattern, but that by the unmistakable existence of such keywords and fundamental outlines it discloses itself as a system of doctrine, about the unity and therefore the purity of which it is not from the outset a hopeless undertaking to inquire. Up to and including our own time, when the Church has spoken about God with almost unbroken constancy and completeness, it has spoken in one way or another about a Lord of the world and of man, and about His action in connexion with the coming ofjesus Christ In one way or another it has described the world as the creation of this God, and man as His creature called to special obedience towards Him. In one wayor another it has spoken of the sin of man and of his reconciliation with God, of the life of the Church as a whole and in its members, and finally of a hope of immortality founded in the knowledge of God and of His action. In detail, the question has alwaysbeen open whether and how far in all this it has spoken out of its being as a Church, or rather out of the being of the Church, or whether it has already ceased to be the Church which it claims to be. As it has spoken about these things, it has never been certain that its doctrine is pure doctrine and therefore the Word of God. But we can say that, by the constancy and completeness with which it has always returned to these themes in its preaching, even when it has fallen into error and falsehood,

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it has itself become a witness to the fact that in what it says about God it is not by any means left to its own devices, that it is alwaysaware at least of the problem of the unity and purity of its teaching, and that even though it may resist it cannot wholly escape a principle which controls what it says about God.

The material which the Church offers contemporary dogmatics will always be new, as will continually appear on a closer inspection, to the extent that both in content and expression the key-words and basic outlines are caught up in an unceasing movement which dogmatics, if its work is not to be too late, if it does not wish to present historical reports rather than the critical co-operation which it owes to the Church of the present, must meet in its most recent, contemporaneous stage. But, again, there is obviously no lack of continuity in this movement, and so it is implied that the key-words and thoughts with which dogmatics has to deal to-day cannot in practice be any different from those with which it had to deal yesterday or four hundred or a thousand years ago. This continuity of basic words and outlines may sometimes be very formal and neutral, but in practice it does at least mean that dogmatics will find itself in conversation not only with the Church of its own generation, but also with that of all the previous "presents" which have now become "past." Indeed, it cannot take up its critical task in regard to its own present, if it refuses to bear in mind that it can be properly understood only when viewed as part of a single movement, of which it forms the most recent stage. The task of dogmatics begins with the question with which it approaches this material. Dogmatics springs from the salutary unrest which must not and cannot leave the Church. It is the unrest of knowing that its work is not done simply by speaking somehow about God, or by speaking with some kind of consistency under the remarkable but undeniable compulsion of the basic words and outlines which supply its framework. As the Church occupies itself with dogmatics, it acknowledges that it is aware of the transformation in which its preaching constantly finds itself, in spite of the formal and neutral identity. It acknowledges that this transformation constitutes a problem. It acknowledges its fear that this transformation might be for the worse, but it acknowledges also its hope that it might be for the better. And finally it acknowledges that it cannot leave this matter to fate, or to the course of an immanent and inevitable development which it can comfortably watch as a spectator, but that it has itself a responsibility in this matter. This sense of responsibility arises, as we have seen, from its realisation of the promise given to it that it can and must speak the Word of God. And from the same realisation there also arises the impossibility of confining itself to establishing the material contents of dogmatics, the broad facts of a speech about God which "somehow" takes place and "somehow" finds unity. From it again, therefore, there arises the seriousness of the question with which dogmatics approaches this material. There exists an exact proportion between the realisation of this promise given to the Church on the one hand, and on the other the strictness of dogmatic inquiry. Where it is not realised, or perhaps where men do not want to realise, that God Himselfwishes to speak and

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will speak to His Church and to the world, men will be more or less content with this "somehow," with the fact that in spite of everything God is still proclaimed (and even with zeal and devotion) in the Church, and they will point with peculiar satisfaction to the undeniable consistency of the key-words and basic outlines. The unceasing changes in their meaning and form will not, then, be felt as a problem; but noted as a gratifying sign of the life and richness of the Church, and there will be no feeling of stimulation either to particular fear or hope. If in these circumstances a dogmatics does set to work in earnest, approaching its material critically and not merely describing it, it will be accompanied from the very first by unconcealed mistrust. It will be felt to be superfluous and disturbing-superfluous, because it cannot improve upon the advantage of the fo~mal and neutral fact that the Church speaks of God with a certain consistency; and disturbing, because, in so far as its criticism is directed first against the key-words and basic outlines, it casts doubt upon, and even in concreto,keenly and seriously disputes, the advantage of the fact that in the Church God is truly and consistently proclaimed. It is inevitable that a true and searching dogmatic inquiry will be flatly opposed where men feel they must reject the assumption of the presence and action of the Word of God Himself or fail to realise its scope. On the other hand, when this assumption effectually prevails, we cannot insist too urgently on a true and searching dogmatic inquiry, even to the point of compromising the whole material of dogmatics, compromising the view that God is really proclaimed in the Church, compromising the idea that the formal and neutral unity supplied by key-words and basic outlines is a genuine unity, and compromising the idea that the Church really is what, on the basis of this unity, the Church means and is intended to be. The question will then be raised about the Church of the Word of God and its unity, not merely about the speaking of God as such, but about the proclamation of the Word of God. To ask these questions will then be the special task of dogmatics, which is so vital for the Church. Is it not right, then, that everything that has the name of speech about God, or unity, or the Church, should be summoned and interrogated for the sake of the real thing, which in the constant flux of human appearance is obviously a problem with which we have to wrestle in fear and hope?

The task of dogmatics consists generally in a critical examination of its material, which means in fact of these key-words and basic outlines of the Church's speech about God. To examine does not mean to reject. It means to take up, in order to test, or weigh, or measure. Its purpose is to see whether the matter to be tested is what it promises to be and really should be. Dogmatics tests the Church's speech about God, in order to find out whether as man's word it is fitted to serve the Word of God. It considers it in the light of the promise that its essential character, order and task are to serve the Word of God and so to be pure doctrine. It does not allow the changing situation in which it stands, and the confusing multiplicity of its meaning and expression, to mislead it into supposing that the Church's speech about God is not worth examining. But, again, it will not wrongly suppose that, because in its reality and its apparent unity this speech would prefer not to be exposed to criticism, it therefore does not need it. About the fulfilment of this criticism we shall have to speak in the last two sections of this chapter. Obviously, an examination of this kind cannot be carried out arbitrarily. As we have seen, the danger is not ruled out that a bad examination of the Church's preaching and therefore bad dogmatics may do more harm than good to preaching. Therefore there is every reason that dogmatics should prove itself to be competent for

3. Dogrnatics as Ethics this task, examining itself first in regard to the method to which it must subject itself if it is to be a good examination and good dogmatics. And if in this preliminary self-examination it is a question of measuring and weighing, it is clear what the questions which dogmatics must first of all put to itself should be: (1) the question concerning the criterion or standard with which it is to conduct its examination; and (2) the question concerning the right use of this criterion and standard. We can call the first the question of the dogmatic norm, the second that of dogmatic thinking. The dogmatic norm is the objective possibility, dogmatic thinking the subjective possibility of the Church's proclamation, of which the reality is the Word of God itself. We therefore retrace the path which we traversed in the third chapter. The reality then was the Word of God (as Holy Scripture) for the Church, the objective possibility was authority in the Church, and the subjective possibility was freedom in the Church. We also retread the waywhich we went in our second chapter. The reality then was the triune God, the objective possibility was the incarnation of the Word, and the subjective possibility the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The correspondence between the individual components of all these discussions speaks for itself, although there could be little value except perhaps an aesthetic in a detailed presentation. The goal of the prolegomena of a Church dogmatics will have been reached when with the same methodical care as hitherto we have completed this final stage of our journey.

3. DOGMATICS AS ETHICS To complete this prolegomena to dogmatics the task which is still before us is the presentation of the principle and method of dogmatics, that is, of the dogmatic norm and the dogmatic process of thought. But before addressing ourselves to this task, we must give an explicit answer to a question which is posed by the history of theology and academic custom, and which forces itself upon our notice at this juncture. This is the question whether alongside Church dogmatics there is a special and independent Church ethics. According to our previous assumptions, this would necessarily involve a special and independent examination of Church proclamation with regard to its suitability as instruction for human good conduct in the Christian sense; or, according to current ideas, a special and independent description of the Christian life. Is there such a thing, and do we not therefore have to do with ethics as well when we treat of dogmatics? Or conversely, have we to understand and treat dogmatics itself as ethics? The history of theological ethics as an independent discipline reveals the following cardinal features. Its presupposition has always been the opinion that the goodness, that is, the holiness of the Christian character, unlike the other objective content of Christian proclamation, is not hidden with Christ in God (in spite of Col. 33), but can be directly perceived and therefore demonstrated, described and set up as a norm. Moreover, the execution of this enterprise seems always to have involved that the Christian character definable in 39

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this way should be construed as a distinctive form of human conduct generally, so that to demonstrate and describe it and set it up as a norm it is necessary to reach back to a general anthropology quite abstracted from the assumptions of revelation. But this process of making ethics independent has always become difficult or impossible in proportion as the opposite opinion has prevailed, that the holiness of the Christian character is not less visible in Jesus Christ, but also not less hidden in the life of Christians, than the remaining content of Christian proclamation; and therefore in proportion as the exclusive authority of revelation over everything that is to be taught in the Church has been recognised or again come to be recognised. Where there have not been these safeguards, where ethics has therefore been able to secure independence, the fact has always had to be reckoned with that an independent ethics has always shown at once a tendency to reverse the roles, replacing dogmatics as the basic theological discipline, absorbing dogmatics into itself, transforming it into an ethical system with a Christian foundation, and then penetrating and controlling biblical exegesis and pastoral theology in the same way. Since independent ethical systems are always in the last resort determined by general anthropology, this inevitably means that dogmatics itself and theology as a whole simply becomes applied anthropology. Its standard ceases to be the Word of God. It is the idea of the good which controls its investigation of the goodness of the Christian character. But this idea is both soug1}.t and found apart from revelation. The Word of God is retained only in so far as it can be made intelligible as the historical medium and vehicle of this idea. The Church which sanctions this theology has subjected itself to an utterly alien sovereignty. We can see both the suggested motifs in the increasingly independent ethical systems of Christian antiquity and the Middle Ages: the material motif, i.e., insight into the evident perfection of Christian character as developed in monastic life in the 'H8tKa of Basil of C