Church Dogmatics
Overview
Karl Barth’s monumental work, Church Dogmatics, is recognized as a landmark in Protestant theology—perhaps the most important work of this century. However, the size range of its fourteen volumes has meant that its content and significance may not be so widely known or appreciated as it deserves. In this concise introduction, Helmut Gollwitzer provides a selection of some of the most important passages from Church Dogmatics to help the busy student explore the heart of the great work; or perhaps to direct a student to parts of the Dogmatics of greatest interest.
Top Highlights
“Revelation is not one species in a genus. It is the concretissimum which cannot be fitted into anything else and must be the starting-point of thought. We are well on the way to understanding Barth when we learn with him to reverse the usual movement of thought from the general to the particular and to move instead from the particular—this particular—to the general.” (Page 4)
“‘If I have a system it consists in the fact that I keep as consistently as possible before me the negative and positive significance of what Kierkegaard has called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity. ‘God is in heaven, and thou on earth.’ The relation of this God to this man, and this man to this God, is for me the theme of the Bible and the sum of philosophy.’” (Page 17)
“Christian faith is as remote from irrationalistic mysticism as it is from a rationalism which posits the axioms of human reason as a measure of the, possibility and actuality of God. It is essentially fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking after understanding.4 Revelation neither lulls the understanding nor eliminates it. It mobilises it, both humbling and yet also encouraging it.” (Page 9)
“Theology is the exposition or expository presentation of the Christian message.” (Page 3)
“What is needed is that the being itself should transcend the limit and self-knowledge of the world, and thereby demonstrate itself. For the idea of the world-governance of such a being can only have substance, the power postulated by Thomas, if by its own initiative and activity and revelation it actualises and makes perceptible the reality of its supramundane being over against the world, thereby demonstrating itself in the midst of the world. This supramundane being can make itself present in the world only by free grace. And it is the source and object and content of the biblical witness that this did actually occur.” (Page 35)
- Title: Church Dogmatics
- Author: Karl Barth
- Edition: First American edition
- Publisher: Westminster John Knox
- Print Publication Date: 1994
- Logos Release Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subject: Theology, doctrinal
- ISBNs: 9780664255503, 0664255507
- Resource ID: LLS:CHRCHDGMNTRDCTN
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-29T22:37:55Z
Karl Barth (May 10, 1886–December 10, 1968) was a twentieth-century Swiss theologian in the Reformed tradition. A vigorous opponent of theological liberalism and modernism, he is sometimes called “the Father of Neo-Orthodoxy.”