0 5. THE CHURCH

The Church, as Barth sees it, is as questionable and equivocal a fact as religion itself. The gusto and emphasis with which at first he set out this view misled certain of his critics, needlessly yet not altogether unnaturally, into supposing that he despised the Church. But we shall see how mistaken this is. More in sorrow than in anger his early work called attention to the fact that the concrete Church, the$nstitution we know, belongs like all earthly things to the present age, the zon of flesh and sin. From this point of view it is simply a more or less effective organization whose aim is to promote certain valuable human interests. Hence, like the world, of which as a visible undertaking it forms part, it stands in absolute opposition to God. As it is put in words that leave nothing to be desired for clearness : “ In the Church the hostility of men against God is brought to a head ; for there human indifference, misunderstanding, and oppo- sition attain their most sublime and also their most nai’ve form.” l Thus, supremely among human things, the Church stands under the Krisis of God.2 Bring it into relation to God, see it in His light, and there is nothing whatever to be said for it. Far from being the Kingdom of God, it is the Tower of Babel. Not that the separatist conventicle is sounder or worthier : “ Better with the Church in hell,” we are told, “ than with pietists of higher or lower type in a heaven-which does not exist ! ” How can we ignore the fact that the more “ up to date ” and

“ efficient ” the Church becomes, the more it is the object 1 Remans, p. 418.

2 “ You only have I known of all the families of the earth ; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities ” (Amos, 3, 2).

310

THEOLOGY OF THE WORD OF GOD [CH. VIII.

of God’s judgment and rejection ? It was the Church, not the world, that crucified Christ.

Now the one thing WC must not do with this is to rcpu- diate it as if spoken by one who sits in the seat of the scorner. Barth is no bitter or triumphant critic, prepared in the pride of superior knowledge to lead the Church in the right way. He is himself deeply and sadly involved in the Church’s imperfections, and utters a brother’s warning. Moreover, on this point as on others, we must hear Barth out to the end. It is true, he writes, with onc- sided dogmatism : “ The work of the Church is the work of men; it can never be God’s work,” 1 but this some- what noisy emphasis is far from being his last word.

What he intends to say is that in proportion as the Church becomes self-deifying, galvanized and complacent, it has lost touch with the purposes for which Christ by His Word gathers round Him a fellowship of faith and love. Men, as such, however much they “ get together “, can never from their own resources heal the hurt of even one soul ; for God and God only can heal and bless. The Church, as we not only observe but share its life, is in itself utterly unworthy, and for that reason perpetually confronted with the possibility of rejection. If it be ignorant of the meaning of repentance, it cannot be the Church of God.

But to stop there is faithlessly to forget the mercy of God.

He has not cast off His people. In and by His grace, the possibility of rejection is unceasingly being overcome.

Doubtless here also the victory of life over death is hidden from us at every moment of time ; it is victory only in hope. But it is none the less sure. “ In any case, we are His, for it is on Him that we are broken in pieces, and for this reason we also participate in His people’s victorious and unconquerable hope.” 2 Existentially, that is in ultimate Divine reality, the promise already fulfilled in Christ holds good for all the Church’s future.

1 Romans, p. 353. 2 Ibid., p. 393.

§

51

T H E C H U R C H

311

If, therefore, those who have only considered the darker side of Barth’s picture turn upon him with the question :

“ If this be the Church’s character, why do you not leave it ? ” his answer is unhesitating. “ It would never enter our heads to think of leaving the Church. For in describ- ing the Church we are describing ourselves.” 1 The man who abandons the Church must have forgotten that it is a company of justified sinners. If we will but cease to censure others from a spectator’s point of view, as though

WC possessed a store of private merits that made us fit judges, if only we accept God’s point of view, to Whom alone vengeance belongs, nothing can be said concerning the Church which is too glorious or lofty. We should then see clearly that “ regarded from the invisible standpoint of God, the operation of the Gospel of Christ cannot be di&nguished from the operation of the Church “.2 We should then feel free to say : “ The Church is the place of fruitful and hopeful repentance ; and it is nothing else.”

The concrete Church “ under the Cross ” is also the Church of the Holy Spirit. Whatever the faults or tribulations o# the Church, we may still boldly say that the real and true Church is that which is strong enough to recognize its weakness in the presence of God. Therefore, participating as we do in its responsibility and sharing the guilt of its inevitable failure, we should humbly accept it and cling to it. So to think will preserve us who make up the visible Church from setting ourselves pharisaically over against any of our fellows. Be our neighbour never so abandoned,

WC cannot avoid the grave question whether in him, precisely in him, Christ may not be confronting us with an inexorable call for service.

Thus Barth’s final estimate of the Church has all the gravity and all the grandeur of Reformation thought.

He is as sure as were the Reformers that through its instrumentality there takes place that movement from

l Ibid., p. 371. 2 Ibid., p. 418.

312

THEOLOGY OF TIIE WORD OF GOD [CH. VIII.

death to life which is the only hope of man. He would join ex animo in the great words of Calvin concerning the body of believing people and their place in the life of faith :

Let us learn by the mere name of mother how profitable, indeed how necessary, is the knowledge of her : since them is no other entrance into life unless she herself conceive us in her womb, unless she bear us, unless she foster us at her breast, unless she guard us under her care and government, until we put off this mortal flesh and become like the angels.

For him, as for the greatest minds in the evangelical tradition, it holds true that outside the Church there is no salvation.

The theology of Barth is eschatological from end to end, but not perhaps in the ordinarily accepted sense of that word.1 As he has put it recently : “ Eschatological does not signify what is not properly or really meant, but what is related to the &qazov, i.e., to that which for our sight, for our experience and thought, is still outstanding, to the eternal reality of the divine fulfilment and execution.” 2

“ Eternal reality ” gives the keynote. Eternity is first, then time ; the future is first, then the present. We have seen that he tunes all his Christian thinking to the truth of Resurrection, and builds everything on hope. We are those who wait ; we have been reconciled, but we still have to be redeemed ; and “ redemption is invisible, inaccessible, impossible, for it meets us only in hope “.3 In the light of Christ the frontier of our existence now is not death but the new promised land. Exaggeration here also is too often a mark of Barth’s language. There are not a few passages in which he goes the length of teaching, contrary to the New Testament, that even faith itself is not actually the beginning of a new life, but only the beginning of yearning for the new life reserved for

1 See T. Ellwein, Evangelische Lehre, p. 169.

p Church Dogmatic, I, pp. 486-7. 3 Romans, p. 314.

0 61

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

313

“

heaven “. But the same apostle who wrote “ we are saved by hope ” wrote also “ we have peace with God “.

Still, allowing for such intelligible hyperbole, we shall do well to listen to Barth as he expatiates on the place of forward-reaching hope in the business of being a Christian.

What the Bible speaks of as the Return of Christ is not, in his view, a second thing in addition to His resurrection ; it is the finally emergent manifestation of that same power of an endless life which came to sight when He was raised from the dead. Until then, we live in a transition stage -between the Ages. As things are now, God rules the world, but, as Luther puts it, not visibly or publicly, but in some such way as the sun shining behind a cloud.

We see the light, we do not see the sun. One day we shall see both, and see them as one. Till then we await the great light that lies behind all history, the day when death -the climax and epitome of all in the world that is against God-shall be dissolved. To that point all God’s acts are moving on. If these things are so, theology is not eschato- logical by accident ; on the contrary, its whole thinking should be done from the standpoint of the End. Barth rightly declares that theology which is mundane, secular, occupied with the “ here ” to the exclusion of the

“ yonder “, is theology only in name.

0 6.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Before we register some of the greater aspects of Barth’s teaching which have issued in the enrichment of the whole Church, I should like to fix attention on one or two matters on which we may reasonably demur. It must be admitted that Barth has not made things easy for his critics. By that I do not simply mean that, in the staple of it, his thought is profoundly Biblical, and therefore unassailable ; though this is part of the truth. I mean rather that his writing, so often, is temperamental. He

314

THEOLOGY OF THE WORD OF GOD [CH. VIII.

states this or that absolutely, when what he really means is that it is an indispensable part of the truth. You will find the complementary truth, formulated with equally absolute emphasis, a few pages later. Hence to anyone starting on his works we may tender the advice : Respite .fwzcm. Take his first sweeping or iconoclastic utterances with a pinch of salt ; wait till the argument is complete before you arrive at a verdict. He may begin with shat- tering negatives ; but there is little doubt that he knows pcrfcctly well they are one-sided exaggerations, indulged in by him for the praiseworthy purpose of rousing the complacent or the conventional, and shaking them into real reflection. His theology, as he himself would have it understood, is a warning cry, with much of the element of ejaculation ; and those who have to warn their neigh- bours use great plainness of speech. Barth’s style of writing is that of a speaker, a rousing orator or herald.

This comes out in the immense number of rhetorical questions to be found on his pages ; no theologian has ever used so many interrogation marks ! Luther too was a speaker, a speaker of genius whose brain and heart God had touched ; and like Luther, Barth by his spiritual exuberance gives himself away to his critics with both hands.

One point at which the most sympathetic student finds it difficult to give assent to Barth’s argument is h i s excessive actualism. By this I mean his persistent tendency to stress what may be called the dynamic aspects of Christian faith and life at the expense of the static.

The whole idea of a “ state ” appears to be distasteful to him. Thus his predominant thought of creation is credo

continua, the ever-renewed calling into existence by God of the whole world of finite things. It is as if created things did not “ stay ” created, but at every moment fell out of existence again. At each instant of time their being has to be restored. This is a familiar idea in the

s 61

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

315

theology of the past, but when made commanding or all- inclusive it has never gained the assent of the best Christian minds. That the conception of perpetual crcntion is part of Biblical thought, no careful rcadcr of prophets and apostles will deny. But it is never employed so as to blanket the conviction that there was a Divine creating of the world once for all. If the Bible be our guide, our faith has to make room for both aspects : that God crcatctl the world, set it in a created state by the word of His power, and that within it He is still constantly creating.

Similarly, his aversion to the idea of a state of personal Christianity is unconquerable. Faith and regeneration are not conditions into which grace brings men, but bestowals from moment to moment. As he puts it in Romans : “ Faith cannot be a concrete thing, that once began, and then continued its course. Faith is the Bc- ginning, the i\Iiraele, the Creation in every moment of time.” l Or again : “ Rightly understood, there are no Christians : there is only the eternal opportunity of becoming Christians.” 2 The motive at work here is clear enough. Whatever happens, we must be rid of the notion that faith is our independent possession, become ours once for all like the colour of our eyes or the name ^{W C} received at baptism, something in short that we ca.n own and enjoy quite apart from God. Holding this, as all right-minded Christian thinkers must, to be a fatal error, Barth conceives that the only method of securing the opposite truth against negation or corrosion is to urge that faith is only real in actu. It is by its very nature an event, an occurrence perpetually renewed. It exists only in the form of momentary decision, in the ever-repeated leap from despair to certainty. Here again we can only say that both aspects of truth must be included, as Scripture undeniably includes them. In the New Testament there are “ believers “, who, as St_ Paul says, “ have peace with

1 p. 499. 2 Romans, p. 321.

316

THEOLOGY OF THE WORD OF GOD [CH. VIII.

God “, or in St. John’s phrase “ have eternal life “. They have this inestimable boon not of themselves. They arc in a certain state or condition, but this state is not self- produced or self-propagated ; God, and God only, sustains them in it. And to them, in this condition, God per- petually ministers new faith. They do not cease to be

“ believers ” because their faith temporarily is overcast ; but when their trust is renewed, the renewal is God’s gift.

To strict Barthians we can say, as we recommend a fuller scripturalness of teaching : “ These things ye ought to have done, and not to leave the others undone.”

Other topics on which we may well seek for further light are these : the conception of the Church which lies behind Barth’s recent dogmatic work. We have a right to know precisely what Barth understands by the Church for which he is writing. More important still, there is that funda- mental subject on which he and Brunner disagree somewhat seriously-the image Dei in man. Briefly, we may say that in Barth’s judgment this image has been totally lost and obliterated by sin, while Brunner contends that it is still represented even in the sinful by their humanity and personality. It is interesting to observe that in his earlier thought Barth took a position which, it might have been supposed, left room for ultimate agreement between the two thinkers. Thus (in Romans, p. 170) he wrote : In all the negativity there is no point which does not bear witness to the summit. There is no relativity which does not reflect a vanished absolute which can never be wholly obliter- ated, since it is this absolute which makes relativity relative.

Death never occurs but it calls attention to our participation in the Life of God, and to that relationship of His with us which is not broken by sin.

But we must turn from these undeveloped hints of criticism to the more congenial task of signalizing the greatness of the theological work done by Barth, and its promise of what is even greater. No true-blue Barthian,

9

⁶¹ SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

317

I suppose, will ever admit that his views can be stated even by a friendly observer without some degree of caricature, but it is to be hoped that no radical injustice has been done above to the chief principles of Barth’s thought.

We owe to him, to begin with, the most serious theological effort of this generation. He rightly rejects the plea that Christian men would be better employed in keeping to practical religious tasks and leaving theology alone. If you have to preach, must you not first clarify your mind ? Must you not decide what you stand for in contrast to Rome, to secularism, to all theology whose centre after all is in humanity or the single Ego ? No better starting-point can be found than universal doubt with regard to all previous systems. To be fundamentally sure, we must first become wholly unsure. Barth is emphatic that the charge made against him of obscurity is misleading.

If our thinking is not to be pseudo-thinking, we must think about life ; for such a thinking is a thinking about God. And if we are t.hinking about life, we must penetrate its hidden corners, and steadily refuse to treat anything as irrelevant.

To be sincere, our thought must share in the tension of human life, in its criss-cross lines, and in its kaleidoscopic movements.

And life is neither simple, nor straightforward, nor obvious.

Things are simple and straightforward and obvious only when they are detached from their context and then treated super- ficially . . . It is not “ complicated ” thinking which is doctrinaire, but that much-praised CL simplicity “.l

It is mere justice to say that Barth has faced more directly than any other Christian thinker of our time the menace to Christian belief presented by Humanism. To a Humanism which understands itself, the ideas of God, sin and death ha.ve lost all importance, except as symbols which proved of temporary advantage in the past. Barth replies that there is a living God, and that God has spoken.

With a volcanic vehemence--feeling that passion alone is 1 Romans, p. 425.