A review by theologiaviatorum
Church Dogmatics 1.1: The Doctrine of the Word of God by Geoffrey William Bromiley, Karl Barth, Thomas F. Torrance

challenging slow-paced

3.5

I finally finished the first part of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics I.1. I still have the second part of this one volume and this is without a doubt already the most difficult thing I have ever read. As such, my attempt at summation should be viewed with skepticism. I sometimes went tens of pages without understanding much of what I read. In this part of the Dogmatics Barth is concerned to show that the Word of God is the only proper criterion for dogmatics. He intimates a Threefold Form of the Word of God (to be further developed in the next half), being revelation, Holy Scripture, and proclamation. He then moves on to define dogmatics. It is the scientific (i.e. systematic) criticism of Church proclamation by the standard of God’s Word. For Barth, it *must* be critical. Any dogmatics that is not “on the move,” that is not a Theologia Viatorum is, of necessity, a dead dogmatics. He writes, “Repetitive exposition ... will ... be indispensable for dogmatics at every step. But dogmatics cannot only be 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 concretions. It consists in putting it at variance with itself as is proper, in driving it outside and beyond itself. The historical account and the personal confession of faith in the name of contemporaries can only be means to this end. Dogmatics becomes unscientific when it becomes complacent. But it becomes complacent —even when pursued with lively feeling and great perspicacity —when it limits itself to the unfolding and display of a possession already at hand” (CD I.1.281). I can not recommend this book to any except the dedicated and series student of theology. Barth is considered by Protestants and Catholics to be one of the greatest theologians—perhaps *the* greatest—of the 20th century, but he is not for the undisciplined or faint of heart.