Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar: The Task and Form of Systematic Theology

 

            We cannot pursue dogmatics without this standard [Holy Scripture] being kept in sight. We must always be putting the question, ‘What is the evidence?’ Not the evidence of my thoughts, or my heart, but the evidence of the apostles and prophets, as the evidence of God’s self-evidence.

            -Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline

            Jesus Christ is not a “principle” or a “program” but a man of flesh and blood….Jesus does not merely announce a true doctrine as prophets or wisdom teachers did. In his very existence he is Truth revealed by God. His birth is already truth: the Word of God becomes “flesh” and dwells among mankind….These are not mere materially expressed symbols of God’s attitude toward the world; they are his very attitude, which is no mere feeling but purpose, action and commitment.

            -Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Office of Peter

            The purpose of this short sketch is to relate Barth and von Balthasar to Professor John Webster’s introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, which briefly covers the history of the discipline and the varieties in task, form, and organization involved.  The two above quotes speak especially to the task and form of a dogmatics, as it is oriented to the person of Jesus Christ and his mission as the embodiment of his person.  In a way, the quotes could be interchanged, said by each other, with, of course, von Balthasar closer relating the normative witness of the scriptural authors to an authority abiding in the Church. Still, the dogmatic task as a positive science grounded in that which is anterior takes its form, here, in the covenantal work of a God who speaks his Mercy (and Justice) in Jesus Christ. Webster’s introduction articulates two orientations, not to be too strictly demarcated, found in systematic theologies: the “dogmatic-analytic,” which concerns the inner-logical expounding of Christian doctrine, and the “apologetic-hermeneutical,” which concerns its relation to other disciplines and societal thought forms in general (p. 7). Barth seems clearly to fall under the former category in his concerns (and confidence in the self-evidencing and sufficiency of Jesus Christ), as I would say does von Balthasar as regards priority but expressed with his own confidence in Christ’s (or the Triune God’s) redemptive effects in the world, especially in the lives of the Saints. Neither is want to constrict the doctrines of the faith to currents of contemporary thought, as done with idealism, existentialism, and, more recently, post-structuralism. The problematic here being that the normative or regulatory, to put it mildly, function inherent in God’s revelation is lost or highly relativized, and following upon this is the more fundamental concern that Jesus Christ in his reality, as the Word of God yet “a man of flesh and blood,” is morphed into an idea, a symbol of notional effect.
            This move towards the priority of thought-schemes relates to Webster’s other two categories based upon the way theologians consider doctrinal concepts to relate to Christian reality claims. The first are those who take the reality claims to be “‘symbolic,’ non-final though not, of course, unnecessary expressions of something anterior.” While the second group judges the reality claims to be “irreducible; they are not expressive, and cannot be translated without serious loss, since their content lies on their surface rather than residing behind or beneath them” (p. 10). Barth and von Balthasar would largely be aligned with the latter group, with those who consider decisive world-historical actions of God to involve the very content from which dogmatic statements derive. The former group, those who rework Christian reality claims into notions of, e.g., Ground-of-Being or Omega Point, considered to be more expressive of God’s relation to man and his purpose, consider the task of dogmatics to be more about deriving truth from the revelation of Christ instead of therein; thus, a prior intellectual account of man’s state vis-à-vis God, or reality in general, works as a controlling hermeneutic to which scriptural and creedal claims are subject. To a degree, this may very well be unavoidable, but the so-called “realist” alternative is averse to creating a “principle” (von B.) out of the Christ-event which neatly maps onto man’s consideration of himself. By saying that the birth, life, death, descent, and resurrection of Christ are the attitudes of God to the world, not “materially expressed symbols,” von Balthasar is locating God’s judgment (God’s consideration of man) in these very events as they reveal our abiding in sin and error at the cost of the Son’s sacrifice wherein humanity is redeemed – a redemption effected by the Spirit in the Church. Herein is the creedal confession of true God and true man; not a God apart from this man and thus not men apart from this God. The alternative is to “sin against the homoousian” (T. Torrance) and structure an intelligibility within reality invariably apart from the Incarnation which, through the Death-Resurrection, is the very securing of material reality and the event-principle for avoiding the errors of gnosticism or hyper-apophatic materialism.
            Difficulties remain, however, for the realist position. The “evidence of God’s self-evidencing” (Barth) is given by the attestations of men who are fallible and thus not the absolute to which all is subject. How to get “behind” this witness to the absolute (Jesus Christ) is the problem, which the “historical Jesus” quest has revealed as bearing innumerable difficulties, therefore, seeming to legitimize the contention that all we have is that which is the symbolic expressions of men which in their fallibility can rightly be considered as non-final – epiphenomenal of who knows what and thus of our own determining (e.g., reconstruction of the NT according to existential address and anti-“mythological” presuppositions). How a dogmatician can best go about arguing otherwise is beyond the scope of this short sketch (and my competence); but, in addition to a metaphysics of God’s free action in his creation, a popular, and legitimate, method is an exegesis that reveals the unlikelihood of the NT texts, given their second temple Greco-Roman context and appropriation/dialogue with the OT, arising from any other account than the realist one of classical orthodoxy; however, this method is limited in that Christ cannot ultimately be accounted for as if given by historical processes, thus requiring, for the believer, the witness of the Spirit and the gift of faith. 

Kevin D.