Church Dogmatics, Volume 4: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Part 3.2
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 third part of Church Dogmatics, Volume 4
- Examines the vocation of man
- Investigates the Holy Spirit’s role in the sending of the Christian community
Contents
- Jesus Christ, The True Witness
- The Vocation of Man
- Man in the Light of Life
- The Event of Vocation
- The Goal of Vocation
- The Christian as Witness
- The Christian in Affliction
- The Liberation of the Christian
- The Holy Spirit and the Sending of the Christian Community
- The People of God in World-Occurrence
- The Community for the World
- The Task of the Community
- The Ministry of the Community
- The Holy Spirit and Christian Hope
- The Subject of Hope and Hope
- Life in Hope
- The Vocation of Man
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 4: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Part 3.2
- Author: Karl Barth
- Editors: Thomas F. Torrance and Geoffrey Bromiley
- Publisher: T&T Clark International
- Publication Date: 2004
- Pages: 496
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
“Christianity, the community of Jesus Christ, neither arises nor continues in this way. It does not rest on the natural need of union and co-operation felt by those who share a common aim. As the individual himself does not come to Jesus Christ and thus become a Christian under the impulsion and in the power of his religious and moral disposition, but only in virtue of the fact that Jesus Christ calls him and thus unites him with Himself, so it is Jesus Christ Himself, not in a second but in and with the first calling of the individual, who calls these individuals in their plurality and unites them with one another.” (Page 682)
“The election is the basis of vocation. Primarily in God Himself man stands already in the light of life—each man and all men. For man’s election is his election in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whom the Father, and He Himself, has not elected for this or that man but for all men, and who has not elected this or that man but all men for Himself. In this twofold election He has taken to Himself and away from them all the rejection which applies to all men as sinners and separates them from God. Not in and of himself, but in Jesus Christ as the eternal beginning of all God’s ways and works, no man is rejected, but all are elected in Him to their justification, their sanctification and also their vocation.” (Page 484)
“The reason why the establishment of the community by Jesus Himself could not emerge as a definite and distinctive event in the Gospel tradition is rather that this is the theme of the whole Gospel narrative as an account of Jesus, the whole of the Gospel narrative as an account of Jesus necessarily being an account of the birth of the Christian community, of the development, corresponding to and consummating the unification of the twelve tribes of Israel in the exodus from Egypt, of the people of God of the last time which has been inaugurated with the coming of Jesus Christ.” (Page 683)