The Architecture of Karl Barths Church Dogmatics

1956 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 236-250
Author(s):  
John Godsey
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
Human Element ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church ◽  
Working Backwards

It may sound a bit presumptuous to speak of the architecture of a dogmatics which is not yet complete, but the size and scope of Professor Barth's Church Dogmatics to date would seem to justify our attempt to examine its outer structure in order to discover the basic dynamic principles involved in this Protestant ‘Summa’. In following this procedure, however, we should be aware that we are working backwards, for, unlike the many dogmatics in which the Christian Faith has been forced into a pre-established mould, Professor Barth has been willing to cast the mould in accordance with the demands of the Faith itself. This is not to deny in any way the obvious human element involving meticulous planning and unusually sensitive organisational skill, but is to state clearly that the Church Dogmatics is not a system conforming to the dictates of human reason, but is a bold yet humble attempt to write a systematic theology which conforms to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. As such, the architectural plans must necessarily result from obedient and faithful listening to the Word of God spoken to the Church, and all future designs must remain fluid and prepared for unexpected changes.

Karl Barth

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Yocum
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
The Self ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
Protestant Theologian ◽  
The Church

This chapter traces the theology of the sacraments of perhaps the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, the Swiss Reformed theologian and pastor Karl Barth. Regarding Baptism and Eucharist as addressed in Barth’s magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, sacraments, along with preaching, are deemed the two primary ways the church proclaims Jesus Christ as the Word of God. Barth emphasizes sacraments as signs of the “secondary objectivity of God,” signs of receiving the self-giving God. While linking Christian baptism with the baptism of Jesus, fascinatingly, Barth eventually argues that baptism is not an actual sacrament. In fact, ultimately Barth actually denies any sacrament except Jesus Christ. Thus, when it comes to sacramental theology, Barth “acts as a healthy foil to those tempted to inflate the role of human institutions and practices.”

Mengkaji Bahaya Sinkretisme dalam Konteks Gereja

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-54
Author(s):  
Yesri E. Talan
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Spiritual Growth ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Absolute Truth ◽  
In Christ ◽  
True Knowledge ◽  
The Church

Syncretism is not just phenomenology in the church but is a real and serious problem. Syncretism is a mixture of Christian faith and culture that results in the congregation losing its identity as a believer, blurred beliefs and do not have absolute truth. Syncretism in the church is a real and serious problem in the life of the church because it negatively impacts spiritual growth.The church cannot grow in true knowledge about Jesus Christ because of the dualism of belief, so Jesus Christ is not the only way of truth and life. The method used in this paper is theological qualitative research. Qualitative is a research method that emphasizes an in-depth understanding of a problem with the process of observation and interview. Conducting literature review and exposition of verses related to the discussion material. This research is descriptive. The results obtained are found the danger of syncretism to the church, namely: the absence of absolute truth in Christ because of the dualism that affects the spiritual growth of the church. Abstrak Sinkretisme bukan hanya fenomenologi di gereja tetapi menjadi masalah nyata dan serius. Sinkretisme adalah percampuran antara iman Kristen dengan budaya yang mengakibatkan jemaat kehilangan identitasnya sebagai orang percaya, kepercayaannya kabur dan tidak memiliki kebenaran absolut. Sinkretisme adalah masalah serius dalam kehidupan gereja karena memiliki dampak negatif pada pertumbuhan rohani. Gereja tidak dapat bertumbuh dalam pengenalan yang benar akan Yesus Kristus karena dualisme kepercayaan, sehingga Yesus Kristus bukanlah satu-satunya jalan kebenaran dan kehidupan. Metode yang dipakai dalam peulisan ini adalah kualitatif teologi. Kualitatif adalah metode penelitian yang menekankan pada suatu pemahaman secara mendalam terhadap suatu masalah dengan proses observasi dan wawancara. Melakukan kajian pustaka dan eksposisi ayat-ayat yang berkaitan dengan materi pembahasan. Penelitian ini bersifat deskriptif. Hasil yang diperoleh adalah ditemukan adanya bahaya sinkretisme terhadap jemaat, yaitu: tidak adanya kebenaran mutlak di dalam Kritus karena adanya dualisme yang mempengaruhi pertumbuhan rohani jemaat.

Where Words End

2021 ◽  
pp. 586-603
Author(s):  
Graham Ward
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Presence Of God ◽  
Creative Experience ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

Revelation cannot be approached directly. It is mediated all the way down. That is not just because of ‘sin’. Though sin is the manifestation of our alienation from God—an alienation overcome by God’s reconciling operations in salvation—a diastema between Creator and creation still pertains. There is no immediate encounter with the Word of God available to us as such. It is always mediated to us through human words and human acts, stories (biblical and autobiographical) and material practices, the Church and its liturgies, and the cultures we inhabit that shape us. The voice of the Lord comes to us in and through the darknesses and ambivalences of our various unredeemed and yet to be redeemed states. We are addressed, continually addressed, by God’s transformative grace, by his love and mercy, in and through our condition as created. The voice is accommodated to that condition, and can be accommodated because the Word of God is written into creation, coming finally, and intensively, in Jesus Christ. So the voice can be heard: makes itself available to be heard. But the eternal presence of God pro nobis (where the ‘we’ is not just humankind but all God’s creatures, pace Barth), the eternal presence of God-with-us that is the touchstone and content of revelation, bubbles up intrinsically through the obscurities of created and creative experience.

The Mission of the Church

1966 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas F. Torrance
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Church

In His birth, life, death and resurrection Jesus Christ finished the work the Father gave Him to do. He the eternal Son and Word of God, by whom all things were made and in whom all things cohere, became flesh, a Man among men, incorporating Himself into the humanity He had made but which had alienated itself from God through sin. It was our corrupt human nature that He took upon Him, but in taking it and in living out His holy life in it, He condemned sin in the flesh and saved what He had assumed, healing and sanctifying the mother through whom He was born, the sinners with whom He identified Himself and to whom He communicated His grace, the company of men and women which He built around Him as His own body, loving them and giving Himself for them, and in them for all mankind. In this oneness with us, wrought out in birth, in life and in death, He offered in Himself to the Father a sacrifice of obedience, bearing our judgment and offering us in Himself to the judgment of the Father, that through His life of obedience in our place where we are disobedient, and through His judgment in our place where we have no justification, He might destroy sin in our body of sin, death in our body of death, and raise us up in Himself to righteousness and new life, presenting us before God as those whom He had brothered and redeemed, and therefore as sons and daughters of the Father in Him.

Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics

2020 ◽  
pp. 341-353
Author(s):  
Eberhard Busch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
Classical Traditions

The most significant Reformed theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Barth, exercised a remarkably critical role relative to the classical traditions of Reformed Theology. His theological project drew on modern biblical criticism, post-Kantian philosophy, and early twentieth-century approaches to Christocentrism. Nevertheless, he prepared to offer a systematic theology by going to school with the classic texts of the Reformed tradition and by engaging in prolonged biblical exegesis. Eventually, Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics presented an orderly account of the Christian faith centred on and beginning with the self-presentation of God in Jesus Christ. It enfolds prolegomena, ethics, and homiletical guidance within its span, believing these ancillary discussions to demand properly theological and thus Christological regulation. This chapter explores the Christological focus and rhetorical style before turning to introduce each of the constituent parts (Word of God, God, Creation, and Reconciliation) of that magnum opus.

Barth and Reformation Theology

2019 ◽  
pp. 100-115
Author(s):  
Randall C. Zachman
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Reformation Theology ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church ◽  
Free Word

Karl Barth seeks to restore the Gospel to the centre of Protestant theology by orienting dogmatic theology to the witness of the prophetic and apostolic authors of Scripture and to the theology of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Barth especially endorses Luther’s claim that the proclamation of the living and free Word of God in Jesus Christ lies at the heart of the commission laid on the church, and that the task of theology is to test the truth of that proclamation. However, Barth becomes increasingly critical of Luther and Calvin when they distinguish God revealed in Jesus Christ from God in Godself and when they distinguish a Word of God in Scripture—be it a Word of the Creator or the Word as Law—that is distinct from the one Word of God, Jesus Christ. Barth also disagrees with Luther and Calvin regarding the sacraments, insisting at the end of his career that Jesus Christ is the one and only sacrament of God.

Whose City?

1966 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 328-340
Author(s):  
Philip J. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Religious School ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

Of the many efforts of the socio-religious school to describe and direct the course of American Protestantism, Professor Harvey Cox's The Secular City1 is by far the most impressive. The title itself with the explanatory sub-title: ‘A celebration of its liberties and an invitation to its discipline’, announces the end of the self-flagellation period we have been enjoying for far too long. Had he performed no other service we should still be most grateful to Professor Cox for his affirmation of our generation, his willing walk into the twentieth century, and his insistence that the Church of Jesus Christ join the present human race. At last a theologian has defended the (telephone) ‘switchboard’ and the (motorway) ‘cloverleaf’ and has exposed the unhealthy and hypocritical business of attacking the only kind of life any of us really intends to live.

‘The One Jesus Christ’: Romans 5:12–21 and the development of Karl Barth's christology

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orrey McFarland
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

AbstractAlthough many Barth scholars have begun to argue for the necessity of evaluating Barth's theology as an interpretation of scripture, so far these efforts have focused more on hermeneutical questions and less on the specifics of Barth's exegesis, the specific ways his conclusions derive from that exegesis, and the interplay between his exegetical work and his theology. Accordingly, this article seeks to contribute to Barth studies by tracing the development of Barth's christology through his exegesis of Romans 5:12–21 in the first edition of the Romans commentary and Barth's later essay Christ and Adam – specifically how he understands the function of Christ's particularity in relation to his universal soteriological significance. These works have been selected not only because they give extended treatments of the text but also because there is a wide timespan between them. Furthermore, in contrast to the second edition of Romans and the Church Dogmatics, these texts remain relatively untapped, and will consequently provide a unique entry-point into Barth's exegetical work. By looking at Barth's theological development through his exegesis of Paul's text, we have a benchmark by which both to trace Barth's development and to critique it: does Barth do justice to both the particular and universal aspects of the christology of Romans 5:12–21? In this way, I intend to take seriously Barth's recurring assertion that his project succeeded or failed by how well it functioned as biblical interpretation. It will be demonstrated that the early Barth was unable to allow Christ's particularity to have much of a soteriological function in his interpretation of Romans 5:12–21, and was thus compelled to downplay the particularity of Christ which is emphasised in the text and instead emphasise his universality as the only aspect of soteriological value. By contrast, the later Barth grounded Christ's universality precisely in his particularity; that is, the Christ-event only had universal soteriological consequence because it was the action of a particular, historical Jesus. Yet, despite any problems we might find with Barth's interpretations, both works display Barth as an interpreter seeking to grapple with the nuances of scripture and with one of the central issues of the biblical text, and of soteriology in general: the relation of the one to the many.

scholarly journals CATEQUESE E EXPERIÊNCIA DE DEUS EM JESUS CRISTO

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (115) ◽  
pp. 317
Author(s):  
Juan Antonio Ruiz de Gopegui
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Local Church ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Faith Sharing ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Church

O processo da renovação catequética adquire cada dia consciência mais clara de que a catequese deve ser obra de toda a comunidade eclesial. É na Igreja local que o cristão deve aprender a dizer a própria fé com palavras e gestos, como expressão de uma experiência pessoal de Deus. A confissão da fé cristã só pode nascer do reconhecimento da voz do próprio Deus na figura de Jesus Cristo transmitida pela Igreja. Reconhecer Deus em Jesus Cristo significa encontrar nele o Sentido pleno não apenas da própria vida, mas da vida do mundo todo. Para as comunidades cristãs serem lugar privilegiado da socialização da fé, a eucaristia dominical, enquanto mistagogia ao Mistério de Cristo, deverá ser o centro da catequese. Tirar as consequências disso levaria a Igreja a rever, em profundidade, a configuração das comunidades locais e consequentemente dos ministérios.ABSTRACT: The process of catechetical renovation acquires each day a clearer consciousness that catechism should be the work of the entire ecclesial community. It is in the local Church that the Christian should learn to articulate one’s own faith with words and gestures, as expression of a personal experience of God. The perseveranconfession of the Christian faith can only emerge from the recognition of Gods own voice in the figure of Jesus Christ transmitted by the Church. To recognize God in Jesus Christ means to find in him the full meaning not only of one’s own life, but of the life of the whole world. For the Christian communities to be the privileged place of faith sharing, the Sunday Eucharist, while mystical expression of the Mystery of Christ, will have to be the center of the catechism. To obtain the consequences of this would bring the Church to review, indepthly, the configuration of the local communities and consequently the configuration of the ministries. 

scholarly journals ABORSI DITINJAU DARI PERSPEKTIF ETIKA KRISTEN

JURNAL LUXNOS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-212
Author(s):  
Yosia Belo
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Ethical Decision ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Ethical Perspective ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Church

Abstract: This research is a qualitative study on abortion from the perspective of Christian faith. This research was conducted to provide academic arguments and scientific references for the Church against the rampant abortion practices and practices, especially in big cities including Jakarta. Using a qualitative approach, it is found that from a Christian ethical perspective, the act of abortion cannot be justified and chosen as an ethical decision because it contradicts or is contrary to the teachings of the Bible. Because God so loves human life and is even willing to send His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to redeem humans from sin. So that humans are not justified in ending the life of an innocent and wronged baby just for practical reasons. Abstrak: Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian kualitatif terhadap aborsi ditinjau dari perspektif iman Kristen. Penelitian ini dilakukan untuk memberikan argumentasi akademis dan referensi ilmiah bagi Gereja terhadap maraknya tindakan dan praktik aborsi terutama di kota-kota besar termasuk Jakarta. Dengan menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif dijumpai bahwa dari perspektif etika Kristen, maka tindakan aborsi tidak dapat dibenarkan dan dipilih sebagai keputusan etis karena bertolakbelakang atau berlawanan dengan ajaran Alkitab. Karena Allah begitu mencintai kehidupan manusia bahkan rela mengutus Anak-Nya yang tunggal, yaitu Yesus Kristus untuk menebus manusia dari dosa. Sehingga manusia tidak dibenarkan mengakhiri kehidupan bayi yang tidak berdosa dan besalah hanya karena alasan-alasan yang praktis.

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