Theology of Karl Barth

The theology of Karl Barth is the system the Swiss Reformed pastor and theologian Karl Barth developed across his Church Dogmatics, built on the conviction that God can be known only through his own self-revealing act in Jesus Christ, not through philosophical argument or general religious experience. Working within the Reformed tradition while departing from its consensus at points, Barth reworked the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of Scripture as the church’s threefold Word of God, and the doctrine of election around this christocentric principle, producing teaching Reformed and evangelical theologians still debate for its faithfulness to confessional orthodoxy.

The Doctrine of Revelation and the Word of God

Barth held that the church’s own preaching, the written Bible, and God’s own self-revealing act together make up a single Word of God in three forms, though not on equal footing: revelation itself is the form the other two depend on and merely attest. Because revelation on this account is always a fresh, sovereign act of God rather than a fixed deposit available for human inspection, Louis Berkhof read Barth as holding that “it is a mistake to regard the Bible as God’s revelation in any other than a secondary sense. It is a witness to, and a token of, God’s revelation.”¹ Barth’s own writing bears this out: in guarding God’s freedom against being “locked up” in the words of Scripture, he wrote,

We recognize that the fact that Jesus Christ is the one Word of God does not mean that in the Bible, the Church and the world there are not other words … and other revelations which are quite real.²

Evangelical readers of Barth have taken this qualification seriously enough to question where he leaves the boundaries of the biblical canon itself: Kimlyn Bender’s study of Barth’s early theology concludes that “Barth is quite ambivalent about questions of canonical boundaries.”³

The Doctrine of the Trinity

Barth placed the doctrine of the Trinity at the very beginning of the Church Dogmatics, in the prolegomena of volume 1, the place earlier dogmatics had reserved for the traditional proofs of God’s existence.⁴ He put it there because he held that God is known only through his own self-revelation in Jesus Christ rather than through independent rational argument, so that the doctrine of the Trinity serves as an account of how God has made himself known rather than a further doctrine resting on a natural-theological foundation laid earlier in the system.⁴

The Doctrine of Election

Barth’s doctrine of election, developed at length in the Church Dogmatics, breaks with the older Reformed and Lutheran teaching that God’s decree of election rests on an “absolute decree” (decretum absolutum) fixed by God’s “absolute freedom” and “good pleasure” prior to any reference to Christ.⁵ On Barth’s reading, treating the “christological reference” of election in Ephesians 1:4, that believers are chosen “in Christ,” as something added to a decree already settled elsewhere leaves that decree “standing in the air” and opens an “abyss of uncertainty” behind it.⁵ His answer is to identify the “electing God” with Jesus Christ himself, so that Christ is at once the one who elects and the one elected, and to treat any further speculation about the eternal Son’s mode of being apart from the incarnation, including the older Reformed teaching of the extra Calvinisticum that the Son is never wholly contained within his assumed humanity, as a “liability” risking “fatal speculation” about a God known apart from his “presence and activity as the Word made flesh.”⁶

Applied to reprobation, this christocentric revision makes it, in Berkhof’s summary, “a reprobation which is dependent on man’s rejection of God’s revelation in Christ,” rather than an eternal and unconditional decree by which God determined beforehand to pass some by, as older Reformed confessional theology held.⁷ Barth stopped short of teaching that every individual will in fact be saved, but his own qualification of reprobation as contingent on personal unbelief, rather than an unconditional decree, leaves the question of universal salvation open in a way the older confessional doctrine does not.

The Rejection of Natural Theology

Barth rejected natural theology outright: the idea that reason, conscience, or the created order can yield real knowledge of God apart from his revelation in Christ.⁴ He stated this rejection directly in his 1934 reply to Emil Brunner, a pamphlet titled simply “No!,” answering Brunner’s own defense of a place for natural revelation alongside special revelation.⁸ Editor John Bolt’s note on Herman Bavinck’s own affirmation of natural theology observes that “thanks to the magisterial role that Karl Barth has played in Reformed and all theology during the twentieth century, the affirmation of natural theology truly fell on dark days.”⁸ Because Barth held that God is known through Jesus Christ alone, he offered no independent proofs of God’s existence and no place for knowledge of God through conscience, intuition, or the created order.⁴

Reception Among Reformed and Evangelical Theologians

Barth’s interpreters divide over how far his christocentric method actually preserves the older confidence that theology describes God as he really is. On what Craig Carter calls the “orthodox interpretation,” Barth still holds that “we really do have access to extra-mental reality through the Word of God as witnessed in the words of Holy Scripture.”⁴ On the “modernist interpretation,” Barth is denying that theology has access to any reality beyond what the human mind itself constructs, so that “theological doctrines are not necessarily statements about reality itself.”⁴ Carter notes that both readings remain widespread in Barth scholarship and cannot both be right.⁴

Barth’s rejection of the classical proofs for God’s existence has also drawn direct confessional objection. J. Gresham Machen wrote that “rational theism, the knowledge of one Supreme Person, Maker and active Ruler of the world, is at the very root of Christianity,” arguing that such knowledge of God was presupposed throughout Jesus’s own teaching rather than something his revelation first supplied.⁹ Michael Kruger’s survey of the resulting debate over Barth’s doctrine of Scripture places Cornelius Van Til and Carl F. H. Henry among early critics who read Barth’s revelation-as-event language as eroding Scripture’s own claim to be, simply and objectively, the word of God, against later readers such as Kevin Vanhoozer and Bruce McCormack who argue the earlier critics misread him.¹⁰

Related Doctrines

References

Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 24-25. ↩
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3:97, quoted in Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 1, “The Church’s Book.” ↩
Kimlyn J. Bender, “Scripture and Canon in Karl Barth’s Early Theology,” in From Biblical Criticism to Biblical Faith, ed. William H. Brackney and Craig A. Evans (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007), 179, quoted in Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1. ↩
Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 46. ↩ ↩²
Duby, 47. ↩
Berkhof, 101-2. ↩
John Bolt, editor’s note, in Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 7, “Knowing God,” n. 36. ↩ ↩²
Carter, chap. 9. ↩
Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1, “The Church’s Book,” note 134. ↩