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The Christian View of Man: An Examination of Karl Barth's Doctrine1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Extract

Volume III of the Dogmatik is concerned with creation, and the first part dealt with the act of creation, elucidating from a specifically Christian point of view the relation of creation and covenant. In this second part, it is the creature which is studied. For a theology bound to the Word of God, the questions at issue concern the nature of man, and the enquiry is controlled by the fact of God having become man. The material which is handled in this vast volume is a selection from man's varied attempts to speak about himself. The aim is to illuminate and to correct the speech of the contemporary Christian Church on this subject, and to do so by proper theological method and criteria. The resultant doctrine may not be very different from what is said in section I (A) of the Lambeth Report Part II, but one cannot help asking whether the statements made there have been reached by the searching discipline of dogmatic theology, practised with the seriousness found in Barth's work. His declared purpose is to seek “comprehensive clarifications in theology, and about theology itself”, which will give the Church strength to offer “clarifications in the broad field of politics”, a strength which is not strikingly obvious in the Lambeth conclusions about “The Church and the Modern World” and “The Christian Way of Life”.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1949

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References

page 58 note 1 The principal articles of doctrine are numbered consecutively throughout the Dogmatik, and the five included in this volume, 43–47, will be quoted in full.

page 69 note 1 The God-man dichotomy can never be transcended in conception, but is transcended in the Person of Jesus Christ, and there alone. The “togetherness” of God and man is of grace, never of nature.

page 72 note 1 Barth refers to the following books: Bultmann: Offenbarung und Heilsgeschehen (1941); Kümmel: Verheissung und Erfüllung (1945); Cullmann: Christus und die Zeit (1946); Marcus Barth: Der Augenzeuge (1946); and to Buri: Die Bedeutung der neutestamentlichen Eschatologie für die neuere protestantische Theologie (1935). But he provides material of his own, both exegetical and theological, which British scholars cannot afford to neglect.