Church Dogmatics, Volume 3: The Doctrine of Creation, Part 1
Overview
Described by Pope Pius XII as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas, the Swiss pastor and theologian, Karl Barth, continues to be a major influence on students, scholars, and preachers today. Barth’s theology found its expression mainly through his closely reasoned 14-part magnum opus, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik. Having taken over 30 years to write, the Church Dogmatics is regarded as one of the most important theological works of all time, and represents the pinnacle of Barth’s achievement as a theologian.
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Key Features
- Provides a translation of Karl Barth’s first part of Church Dogmatics, Volume 3
- Investigates the historical account of creation
- Examines God as the creator
Contents
- The Work of Creation
- Faith in God the Creator
- Creation and Covenant
- Creation, History and Creation History
- Creation as the External Basis of the Covenant
- The Covenant as the Internal Basis of Creation
- The Yes of God the Creator
- Creation as Benefit
- Creation as Actualization
- Creation as Justification
Praise for the Print Edition
[Barth] undoubtedly is one of the giants in the history of theology.
—Christianity Today
There are at least three key ideas in [Barth’s] early thought critical for his later writings. The first is the absolute transcendent sovereign God in contrast to sin-dominated mankind. Second is a dialectical theological method which poses truth as a series of paradoxes. For example, the infinite became the finite; eternity entered time; God became human. Such paradoxes create tension, in which one finds both a crisis and truth. The crisis, the third idea, involves humans. The individual discovers in the tension of the dialectic a crisis of existence, judgment, separation, belief/unbelief, acceptance/rejection of the ultimate truth of God concerning mankind as revealed in the Word.
—Biographical entries from Evangelical Dictionary of Theology
Barth’s greatest influence was theological, with his emphasis on God’s sovereignty placing him firmly in the Reformed (Calvinistic) tradition. He differed radically from the mainstream of continental European theology, rejecting both its subjective emphasis on religious experience and the prevalent idea that Christian doctrine is subject to, or limited by, its historical origins. By reaffirming what Kierkegaard had called an ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between God and humankind, Barth rescued theology from captivity to anthropology—that is, he reasserted God’s reality and sovereignty over human knowledge or imagination.
Product Details
- Title: Church Dogmatics, Volume 3: The Doctrine of Creation, Part 1
- Author: Karl Barth
- Editors: Thomas F. Torrance and Geoffrey Bromiley
- Publisher: T&T Clark International
- Publication Date: 2004
- Pages: 448
About Karl Barth
Karl Barth (1886–1968), a Swiss Protestant theologian and pastor, was one of the leading thinkers of twentieth-century theology, described by Pope Pius XII as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas. He helped to found the Confessing Church and his thinking formed the theological framework for the Barmen Declaration. He taught in Germany, where he opposed the Nazi regime. In 1935, when he refused to take the oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler, he was retired from his position at the University of Bonn and deported to Switzerland. There he continued to write and develop his theology.
Barth’s work and influence resulted in the formation of what came to be known as neo-orthodoxy. For Barth, modern theology, with its assent to science, immanent philosophy, and general culture and with its stress on feeling, was marked by indifference to the word of God and to the revelation of God in Jesus, which he thought should be the central concern of theology.
Top Highlights
“Creation comes first in the series of works of the triune God, and is thus the beginning of all the things distinct from God Himself. Since it contains in itself the beginning of time, its historical reality eludes all historical observation and account, and can be expressed in the biblical creation narratives only in the form of pure saga.1 But according to this witness the purpose and therefore the meaning of creation is to make possible the history of God’s covenant with man which has its beginning, its centre and its culmination in Jesus Christ. The history of this covenant is as much the goal of creation as creation itself is the beginning of this history.” (Page 42)
“In his exposition of the doctrine of God in Volume II, Barth showed that God cannot be known in abstracto*, but only in the overflow of His life and love to the creature. Turning now to the doctrine of creation in Volume III, he insists that creation cannot be known or interpreted by and for itself, i.e., apart from the knowledge of the divine election and salvation in Jesus Christ.” (Page vii)
“In contrast to everything that we know of origination and causation, creation denotes the divine action which has a real analogy, a genuine point of comparison, only in the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father, and therefore only in the inner life of God Himself, and not at all in the life of the creature. The historical secret of the creation is that outwith His own reality God willed and brought into being a correspondence to that which, as the constitutive act of His deity, forms the secret of His own existence and being.” (Pages 13–14)