5. The Credo finally shows the Church engaged in missionary work, directed towards the world which is not yet gathered into the Church, facing it with responsibility and appeal. How else is it to explain and defend itself, how else recruit and invite, link up and try to gain ground with its message than by confessing its faith, as far as possible in its fullness and yet in the shortest words, as free as possible from everything accidental, as far as possible purified from every ambiguity, as definite as it is possible for faith to be, i.e. in its relation to the object from which it derives its life? Even the material content of the Church’s proclamation will always have to be the Credo. Among all human factors only the fact of faith is able to summon to faith. In the Credo the Church attempts to place this fact on the map.
In Dogmatics, also, it is able to do and aims at doing nothing else. What is here added is the explanation of the Credo. It gives to the fact of faith a breadth, a distinctness and perspicuity in which the Credo as such is lacking. Dogmatics is the Credo speaking here and to-day, speaking exactly according to the needs of the moment. Be it understood: the missionary and apologetic power can even here be nothing else than faith, or the testimony to its object, or its object itself. Dogmatics has no means of throwing other bridges between Church and world than that of the Confession. But its very attempt to exhibit the Confession as, on its Scripture basis, self-consistent and comprehensible, is able to give to the Confession a peculiar language, which, with its peculiar dangers, yet also has its peculiar promise. And let it not be imagined that it is only perhaps in scientifically employed or oriented circles that many are looking for just this language, the language of the dogmatically rigorous and detailed confession.
6. What has been said would not be complete if finally we did not also remember the limits of the Credo and so also of Dogmatics. The life of the Church is not exhausted by its confessing its faith. The Credo as such and Dogmatics as such can by no means guarantee that proper proclamation with which they are connected. They are only a proposal and attempt in that direction. And even proper proclamation, secured not only on the human side by the Credo and Dogmatics, but really and decisively secured by God’s grace, has in the life of the Church three inevitable frontiers:
The first is the Sacrament, through which the Church is reminded that all its words, even those blessed and authenticated by God’s Word and Spirit, can do no more than aim at that event itself, in which God in His reality has to do with man. Just these visible signs of Baptism and Holy Communion have manifestly, in the life of the Church, the important function of making visible the bounds between what can be said, understood and to that extent comprehended of God by man—and the incomprehensibility in which God in Himself and for us really is Who He is.
The second frontier of the Credo and Dogmatics is very simply our actual human life, in its weakness and strength, in its confusion and clarity, in its sinfulness and hope, that human life of which all the Church’s words certainly do speak, without as words reaching and touching it, even where God Himself bears His witness to them. Much criticism and depreciation of Dogma and Dogmatics would remain unuttered if it were only clearly understood that human words as such must indeed serve the end, but can do no more than serve the end that our actual life be placed under God’s judgment and grace.
The third frontier is the frontier which separates eternity from time, the coming Kingdom of God from the present age, the eschaton from the hic et nunc. Credo and Dogmatics without doubt stand together under the word of Paul (1 Cor. 13:8 f.) according to which our gnosis and our prophecy are in like manner in part and will be done away, childish speech that will have to be put away when manhood is reached, a seeing in the dark mirror, not yet a seeing face to face. Meaning, essence and task of the Credo and of Dogmatics are based on conditions which, when God is all in all, will undoubtedly no longer prevail.
The existence of these three frontiers or limits might well be named at the outset the chief problem of Dogmatics. In any case we must never for a moment forget them. All that was said at the beginning holds good within these limits. And rightly understood, the very existence of these limits will no doubt give to what has been said a peculiar importance. Where you have limit, there you have also relationship and contact. Credo and Dogmatics stand facing the Sacrament, facing human life, facing the coming age, distinguished from them, but facing them! Perhaps in the way in which Moses in his death faced the land of Canaan, perhaps as John the Baptist faced Jesus Christ. Could anything more significant be said of them than this, their limitation?
IF the symbol begins with the decisive word, “I believe in God,” and if it is permissible for us to characterise this its first word as also the cardinal proposition of Dogmatics, then we must go on to establish the following: The relationship between this “in God” and what follows in the three parts of the symbol with regard to Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot and must not in any circumstances be understood in the sense that this “in God” signifies, as it were, the specification of a general concept of known content which then receives in the three parts of the symbol its special historical ingredients, namely, the Christian filling out and elaboration. “God” in the meaning of the symbol—of the symbol which aims at giving again the testimony of the prophets and apostles—“God” is not a magnitude, with which the believer is already acquainted before he is a believer, so that as believer he merely experiences an improvement and enrichment of knowledge that he already had. When Paul says (Rom. 1:19) that what can be known of God (τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ, cognoscibile Dei) is manifest to them, for God manifested it unto them, the whole context as well as the immediately preceding statement (Rom. 1:18) shows that Paul sees the truth about God “held down” among men, made ineffective, unfruitful. What comes of it in their hands is idolatry. And with Paul, as with all the prophets and apostles, idolatry is not a preparatory form of the service of the true God, but its perversion into the very opposite, to which therefore they, with their witness to God, do not attach but oppose their witness. The single point of contact—one that, it seems to me, is employed very ironically—is reckoned by Paul the altar of the unknown God (Acts 17:23). The word “God” in the symbol, therefore, must not mislead us into first giving consideration to the nature and the attributes of a being which, on the basis of our most comprehensive experiences and deepest reflection, we think we have discovered as that which this name may and must fit, in order thereupon, under the guidance of the historical statements of the symbol, to ascribe to the subject so conceived this and that definite predicate, behaviour and act. On the contrary, we have to begin with the admission that of ourselves we do not know what we say when we say “God,” i.e. that all that we think we know when we say “God” does not reach and comprehend Him Who is called “God” in the symbol, but always one of our self-conceived and self-made idols, whether it is “spirit” or “nature,” “fate” or “idea” that we really have in view. But even this admission, of course, cannot carry the meaning that in it we are proclaiming a discovery of our own. The “unknown God” of the Athenians, the God of the agnostics was, to Paul’s view, an idol like all the rest. Only God’s revelation, not our reason despairing of itself, can carry us over from God’s incomprehensibility.
In telling us that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the symbol, which speaks of God on the basis and in the sense of the prophetic-apostolic witness, expresses absolutely for the first and only time Who God is and What God is. God is God precisely and only in that being and action which are here, in a new and peculiar way, designated as those of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Only in this reality of His that bears on us is God God. All our preconceived representations and ideas of what from our own consciousness we think we are compelled to take for “God,” have, when we confess, “I believe in God,” not indeed to disappear—for