Barth’s Ecclesiology

In an essay on Barth’s sacramental theology (in the Cambridge Companion to Barth ), James J. Buckley summarizes Barth’s early views on ecclesiology in the modern age as follows: “Modern man “‘nationalizes’ the Church and the Church allows this nationalization,’ elevating ‘the idea of the relativity of all confessions to the status of a universally valid truth with the full weight of political power’ long before theologians thought to do so. Modernity, from this point of view, is the birth of the question of what the normative human community and its rituals are ?Eor (in other words) of ‘ecclesiology’ as the study of normative HUMAN community, of ‘Church sacramentology’ as the study of normative HUMAN rituals and symbols.” Buckley later elaborates the point: “the topic of ‘Church and sacraments’ became a separate topic in modernity precisely as the world turned from this church and its sacraments; church and sacraments acquired, we might say, a new visibility for some precisely when they became invisible to most . . . . at least early in his life, Barth read modern theology as a futile effort to conceive church and sacraments as primarily HUMAN community and rituals. On a practical leve, this meant that the nation-state (THE modern visible community) subsumed the church, while spirituality became the central outward sign signalling and, for all practical purposes, causing grace. On a theoretical level, ecclesiology and sacramentology, we might say, become subdivisions of sociology and ritual studies.” Precisely so.