Purpose of Theology

Barth offers these wise words about the purpose of dogmatics (which consists, for Barth, of the correction, clarification, and criticism of church proclamation by measuring proclamation against the Word of God in the Bible): “Repetitive exposition according to the intentions of the theologians named will, of course, be indispensable for dogmatics as every step. But dogmatics cannot be only exposition. Its scientific character consists in unsettling rather than confirming Church proclamation as it meets it in its previous concretions and especially in its present-day concretion. It consists in putting it at variance with itself as is proper, in driving it outside itself and beyond itself . . . .Dogmatics becomes unscientific when it becomes complacent . . . .It is not only what is called the ‘rigid’ dogmatics of the old style (often the Roman Catholic style) that is to be called unscientific in this sense. The same can and must be said of the most fluid, mobile and pious modern dogmatics to the degree that its critical nerve is perhaps dead, to the degree that for the church around it its significance is merely that of a pleasant certification that all is well and can go on as it has been. So long as the Church on earth is a Church of sinners and its proclamation is thus beset by the most serious problems, one can say very definitely that a dogmatics which takes this attitude and produces this result is wrong.”