Comments on C.D., I/1, §2

§2.1

The first half of the section seems to consist largely in Barth’s reaction against some of his contemporaries, especially Brunner,

although he also seems to address the principles underlying their work rather than the details of it.

Some of his reasoning escapes me entirely, and some of his assertions seem to rely on being obvious rather than on a set of arguments. Does all apologetics abandon dogmatics, or does he refer only to Brunner’s? I don’t know which he means, and neither assertion is obvious to me. His assertion that apologetics and polemics have never been effective except when unplanned is backed up only with three other bare assertions that are no more obvious than the one they are meant to support.

Still, he makes some good points. Our apologetics surely shouldn’t take unbelief more seriously than it takes faith, and this is a weak point for our culture. It seems impolite not to take the other person’s point of view as seriously as our own; we want to figure out how to explain faith in terms native to the unbeliever, i.e., in terms of unbelief. We try to understand the unbeliever’s point of view and objections and values, and then we imaginatively put ourselves into that place, the place of unbelief, and ask, “How can I get to faith from here so I can show my friend the path to faith?”

This method seems to have several strengths:

1) It tries to clear away mistakes of fact or interpretation held by the unbeliever.

2) It tries to find the other weaknesses and assumptions in which the unbeliever finds security.

3) It attempts to embody a peer-to-peer appeal, rather than give correction or rebuke from a superior to an inferior.

But this method of apologetics also makes several fatal mistakes:

1) It assumes that the path from unbelief to faith is completely rational and that the transformation from unbeliever to believer can be accomplished by human endeavor, when the transformation results from God’s creative work in the hearer.

2) It subordinates the viewpoint of faith to the viewpoint of unbelief by assuming practically that the viewpoint of faith should be understandable to unbelief.

3) It assumes that the chief barrier between the unbeliever and faith is a matter of reliable information, whereas the chief barrier is a lack of the Holy Spirit’s regenerating work in the unbeliever’s heart.

This leads to a kind of despair and another kind of hope for apologetics:

Despair: I can’t bring my friend to faith. I have to rely on God to change my friend.

Hope: I can rely on God to love my friend more than I do. Therefore, as I bear witness to Jesus Christ by work and word, as I remember to point my friend to Him, God works to make the connection, standing in front of my words, so to speak, so that my friend will eventually see Him as God enables.

§2.2

What does Barth mean by “the being of the Church”? And what does he mean when he says that the being of the Church “is identical with Jesus Christ”? I hope that subsequent material will clear this up. He obviously doesn’t mean that the Church is Jesus Christ, since in this half-section he clearly distinguishes the lordship of Christ from the “subsequent ecclesiastic reality” that we can point to with a secular “There,” to use Barth’s language. He does say (p. 41) that “if the being of the Church is identical with Jesus Christ,” then “the place from which the way of dogmatic knowledge is to be seen and understood can be … only the present moment of the speaking and hearing of Jesus Christ Himself, the divine creation of light in our hearts.” What a tender and promising picture!