Thus theological thinking that involves the two poles of thought, God and man, and is yet a thinking from a centre in God, that is thinking from out of a centre in the concrete action of God in Jesus Christ, as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, is essentially thinking within the Church. The Church is the realm created in the midst of human existence and history by the self-revelation of God, the area in the midst of all our other knowledge where God is known in accordance with his revealing and saving acts, where God is known as Subject, and is therefore worshipped and loved and obeyed as the Lord of all our human ways and works and thoughts. The Church is not the society of individuals who band themselves voluntarily together through a common interest in Jesus Christ, but it is a divine institution, the creation of the divine decision and election, of the divine love to give himself to men and to share with them his own divine life and love, and so to share with them knowledge of himself. Because the Church is a divine institution it is not governed by an ideology, some self-interpretation, a controlled and systematically worked out truth of its own historical existence and actuality: rather is it governed by the Word of God, and through obedient conformity to that Word. Theology is thus an essential part of the Church’s life, in which it questions its own obedience and tests its conformity and seeks unceasingly to live not out of itself, but out of God in his revelation; not out of what it can think out for itself, but out of what it can hear from God and think into its life and being in history. Theology is part of the Church’s humble worship of God, worshipping with its mind as well as with its body, an act of repentant humility, an act of thankful enjoyment of God, an act of the glorification of God.
Theology has two sides to it. On the one hand, it is an act of repentance, in which it puts to itself critical questions, to test its preaching of God’s Word, to sift its understanding of the Truth, to see whether it is in harmony with what God reveals of himself through his Word, and so to distinguish what is genuinely heard from what is an artificial product of man’s own. That is the scientific task of dogmatics. On the other hand, it is an act of worship, in which it seeks understanding of God, in which it not only travels the road which the Word of God has taken from God to man, but travels the road from man back to God, in order to find in God the goal of all human thinking as well as its source. Theology is a lifting up of the heart unto the Lord, a worshipping of God with the mind, in which we seek understanding of God in the midst of our faith that we may enjoy him and serve him in his Truth. That is the doxological task of dogmatics.
3. Theology and Secular Knowledge
Theology that takes its task seriously as rational thinking cannot escape encounter with philosophy and natural science, for theology does not operate in a realm all of its own, but in the same realm of human thinking where philosophy and all the positive sciences are at work. Just because it is human thinking concerned with the subject-object relationship, like every other form of human thinking, theology necessarily shares with every other form of human thinking certain important problems and questions which it must not avoid. That does not mean that theology must give up its own peculiar nature, for it can no more do that than give up its own proper object—it would be just as foolish to ask physics or biology to move into some general realm of thought and to detach its thinking from its own proper object or field of investigation. But it does mean that theology must operate with human thought and speech as its instruments, and must take seriously the laws and possibilities and limits of human thought and speech within which every science operates and which it is the business of philosophy to clarify as it seeks to fulfil its own task in developing its understanding of the world of being and idea. On the other hand, because theology has problems that overlap with philosophy and other sciences, it must subject itself to rigorous control and the discipline of self-critical revision in order to ensure that it is really being good theology, and not some debased brand of theology that confuses its task and its subject-matter with those of philosophy or some science of nature. Thus, while recognizing its own peculiar nature, and pursuing it with unceasing vigilance and exacting criticism, it must think out its connexion with philosophy and natural science and make clear its distinction from them.
This was one of the main questions Barth found he had to answer, particularly when he began to move from his earlier dialectical thinking into more positive thinking in the construction of a dogmatics. It became even more acute when he had completed his first attempt at what he called Christian Dogmatics and studied it in the light of the criticism it met from his colleagues and opponents and the even stronger criticism it met from himself when he read it again in print. That is the period that follows closely upon the republication of these essays on Theology and Church in 1928. He set himself therefore to clarify his understanding of the essential nature and method of theological activity in the light of its own proper object and in distinction from knowledge beyond the limits imposed on theology by its object. As Barth saw it, this involved for theology a philosophical problem and a scientific problem.
(a) The philosophical problem
Both theology and philosophy are concerned with the subject-object relationship, but whereas theological thinking is bound to a concrete object and moves in a direction chosen for it by the activity of its object, God-in-his-Word, philosophy is not so bound to a concrete object, and is in a position to move more freely in any direction that its own reflection upon man’s existence and actuality may lead it. It is incumbent upon theology to clarify the way in which its thinking overlaps with that of philosophy, and the way in which its thinking is distinct from that of philosophy. An examination of the history of philosophy shows its fundamental dialectic to be concerned with a constant tension between realism and idealism. But that is also the dialectic in which theology engages in its movement between the given object and thought about the object, and therefore it must be in this dialectic that the relevance of philosophical thinking for theology is to be found.
In the first place, then, theology must face the critical questions posed by philosophy as to objectivity, givenness, or reality—that is the problem of realism. Classical realism holds that all our knowledge arises out of actual experience of a given reality, but it also admits that this involves an outward and an inward experience, an objective and a subjective givenness. How, then, are we to distinguish the independent objective reality from our experience of it, especially from our inward subjective experience of it? That is the question that a realist theology must face. It takes as its fundamental proposition that God is, and so affirms that God has reality independently of our knowledge of him. As Anselm expressed it, it is one thing to say that something exists in the understanding, and another thing to understand that it exists. But how in point of fact are we to distinguish the two? How do we know that the God whom we know in our minds has existence apart from our mental knowledge of him, that ‘God’ is anything more than an empty ‘idea’ in our minds?
That problem is made all the more acute when we remember that the God we claim to know is not some God in himself, but God who is known in his Word, the God who reveals himself within the concrete objectivities and actualities of our human and historical existence; that is, within the Church of Jesus Christ on earth. How are we to distinguish God from the outward experience of these concrete objectivities in the I-Thou encounter we have with other people, or in the concrete objectivities of history? Theological realism insists that God is given to me in the actualities of my experience in the form of a likeness to himself, in the realm of being which I have in nature and history, and that he meets me in my neighbour and within the subject-subject encounter of person to person in the Christian Church. But how am I to distinguish God himself from these external objectivities through which he reveals himself to me? And if I hold that God is the source of all Being, and that all other being derives from him and participates in him, and if therefore I think