Timothy George on Karl Barth as a "church theologian"

I enjoyed this article by Timothy George on Karl Barth. The whole article is good and worth reading, I especially enjoyed the beginning note about Harvey Cox smuggling Barth's Dogmatics into the Soviet Union. Below is an excerpt from the article about Barth as a "church theologian": 

"Karl Barth was a churchly theologian. What does this mean? In the first place, it refers to the fact that, unlike the majority of professional theologians, both in his day and in ours, Barth did not possess an earned doctorate. This was obviously not from any lack of scholarly ability on his part, but rather from his prior decision to pursue pastoral ministry rather than an academic career. For twelve years Barth served as a pastor, first as a pastoral assistant at a German-speaking congregation in Geneva and then as pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church in Safenwil, a small industrial town in the Aargau. Barth’s distinctive theology emerged out of his pastoral struggles. What does the preacher say to the waiting congregation every Sunday morning? How dare he say anything at all? This tension between the preacher’s duty to speak for God, on behalf of God, and the enormous presumption, indeed the impossibility, of doing so is at the very root of Barth’s theological discovery. He once put it like this: “We ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory.”
Barth’s theological training in the great liberal tradition of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Harnack, and Hermann had not prepared him to deal with this dilemma, nor had his immersion in the Swiss version of the social gospel movement, an involvement which earned him the title “red pastor” for a while. Barth was haunted by the question King Zedekiah posed to Jeremiah long ago: “Is there any word from the Lord?” (Jer. 37:17). This question, which is every preacher’s question, propelled Barth back to the Holy Scriptures, where he discovered a new orientation for preaching and a new basis for theology.

Barth is a churchly theologian in another sense as well. He understands theology, which he defines as “the scientific self-examination of the Christian church with respect to its distinctive God-talk,” to be a spiritual discipline within the community of faith. The purpose of theology is to serve the integrity of preaching, and thus it is part of the church’s humble worship of God. Following his stint as “a young country pastor,” as Barth referred to his Safenwil days, he spent the rest of his life in four university settings: in Göttingen (1921-25), in Münster (1925-30), in Bonn (1930-35), and finally in his native Basel (1935-68).

There is a sense, however, in which Barth never left the pastorate, for all of his work as an academic theologian—lectures, addresses, books, disputes, and sermons—was intended to serve and build up the church. This commitment is reflected in the title he gave to his major theological project. After publishing the first volume of his Christian Dogmatics in 1927, he abandoned this effort and made a fresh start under a new definitive rubric,Church Dogmatics. In Barth’s view, theology can never be a mere branch of “religious studies,” a scholarly activity pursued with presumed objectivity and lack of personal commitment. As Barth would say near the end of his career, theology is not an end in itself but rather a service in and for the community of Jesus Christ. “Theology is committed directly to the community and especially to those members who are responsible for preaching, teaching, and counseling. The task theology has continually to fulfill is to stimulate and lead them to face squarely the question of the proper relation of their human speech to the Word of God, which is the origin, object, and content of this speech.” Theology must be done in the service of the church or it is not a ministerium Verbi Divini.

Despite Barth’s sturdy determination to be a theologian in the service of the church, he can be acutely critical in his statements about the church. This was especially so in Barth’s early writing, in which the gospel is depicted in stark opposition to the church. An easy equipoise between these two realities is not possible, for “the gospel dissolves the church and the church dissolves the gospel.” The church, Barth seems to say, has become not a means to God but rather a substitute for God, an idol.
In the church, the “Beyond” is transfigured into a metaphysical “something” which, because it is contrasted with this world, is no more than an extension of it. In the church, all manner of divine things are possessed and known, and are therefore not possessed and not known. In the church, the unknown beginning and end are fashioned into some known middle position, so that men do not require to remember always that, if they are to become wise they must die. In the church, faith, hope, and love are directly possessed, and the Kingdom of God directly awaited, with the result that men band themselves together to inaugurate it, as though it were a thing which men could have and await and work for.What Barth protests is the domestication of God in the structures and institutions of the church. The church understood as the repository of religious consciousness, or as the apex of “Christian” civilization, or as the private club of moral rectitude, could no longer be the place where the thunder and lightning of God’s grace breaks through to human beings. It was necessary, Barth felt, to write “Ichabod” over the door to such a church precisely so that the gates could be opened to let the King of Glory enter in. He put it like this: “Only when the end of the blind alley of ecclesiastical humanity has been reached is it possible to raise radically and seriously the problem of God.”
Barth’s critique of the church here is more like that of Luther than that of Wycliff, Hus, Savanarola and other pre-reformers who protested vigorously against the abuses of the late medieval church. Such matters are mere trifles compared to what Barth calls “the blessed terribleness of the theme of the Church which is the very Word of God—the Word of beginning and end, of the creator and redeemer, of judgment and righteousness.” In this dialectic the church is divided into two parts—the Church of Esau and the Church of Jacob. By this designation Barth does not refer to confessional differences, say, between Roman Catholics and Protestants, nor to different theological camps such as conservatives and liberals. The Church of Esau is “observable, knowable and possible,” whereas the Church of Jacob is where the truth of the gospel triumphs over all human deceit. This latter church, Barth goes on to say, is “unobservable, unknowable, and impossible . . . capable neither of expansion nor of contraction; it has neither place nor name nor history; men neither communicate with it nor are excommunicated from it. It is simply the free grace of God, his calling and election; it is beginning and end.”Here we are at the headwaters of Barth’s dialectical ecclesiology. It is not hard to see why those with a vested interest in the church—any church—would respond to Barth’s rhetoric with consternation and reproach. If the church is utterly unknowable, unobservable, so detached from history that one cannot speak of it properly, then very practical questions ensue: To whom do we pay our tithes (or church taxes in the state churches of Europe)? Who shall train the church’s ministers, and how? Who shall write the church’s liturgy, or lead its worship, or send out its missionaries, or do its pastoral care? It has always seemed to some of Barth’s critics that his “bifurcation” of the church would lead inevitably to ecclesial nihilism.
But this is to miss the deeper point that Barth is making. It is necessary, he believed, to be so decisively against the church, precisely in order to be so unreservedly for it. Even in Romans, where the language of diastasis reaches fever pitch, Barth always remains with both feet firmly planted within the physical, finite, fallen, Esau-like church.
We must not, because we are fully aware of the eternal opposition between the Gospel and the church, hold ourselves aloof from the church or break up its solidarity; but rather, participating in its responsibility and sharing the guilt of its inevitable failure, we should accept it and cling to it.
We must bear the tribulation of the church as participant-observers. Only through sharing its anguish are we able to pray for revival and work for reformation."