[October 2000 journal entry]
I waded through most of Barth’s Church Dogmatics and other publications first during my doctoral studies and then through each year’s preparation for the current religious thinking graduate course I taught 1979-92. Barth was very critical of the ‘religious a priori’ considered in liberal thought from Schleiermacher forward to be antecedent to Christian faith/experience. He separated himself unequivocally from the ‘religious a priori’ variations found in Tillich et al and Kierkegaard et al. Barth knew he could not simply deny the results of critical scholarship (thus the error in associating him too closely with evangelical/fundamentalist thought in the United States). By proposing a ‘divine in-break’ prior to human response or theological reflection (the more traditional Reformed side of Barth), he found room to acknowledge but then marginalize the results of critical scholarship (much to the disappointment and frustration of Harnack). Barth played a central/leading role in the formation and development of the Pastors’ Emergency League in the early-1930s (from which came the Confessing Church). The urgently needed opposition to the Nazi-sympathizing ‘German Christians’ (a frightening form of a ‘religious a priori’) weighed heavy on his mind. I would say that Barth proposed/attempted a ‘revelation a priori’ (i.e., Bonhoeffer’s charge that Barth erred in opting for “a positivism of revelation”). I think Bonhoeffer was objecting to Barth’s variation on a ‘from above’ methodology and perspective.
I waded through most of Barth’s Church Dogmatics and other publications first during my doctoral studies and then through each year’s preparation for the current religious thinking graduate course I taught 1979-92. Barth was very critical of the ‘religious a priori’ considered in liberal thought from Schleiermacher forward to be antecedent to Christian faith/experience. He separated himself unequivocally from the ‘religious a priori’ variations found in Tillich et al and Kierkegaard et al. Barth knew he could not simply deny the results of critical scholarship (thus the error in associating him too closely with evangelical/fundamentalist thought in the United States). By proposing a ‘divine in-break’ prior to human response or theological reflection (the more traditional Reformed side of Barth), he found room to acknowledge but then marginalize the results of critical scholarship (much to the disappointment and frustration of Harnack). Barth played a central/leading role in the formation and development of the Pastors’ Emergency League in the early-1930s (from which came the Confessing Church). The urgently needed opposition to the Nazi-sympathizing ‘German Christians’ (a frightening form of a ‘religious a priori’) weighed heavy on his mind. I would say that Barth proposed/attempted a ‘revelation a priori’ (i.e., Bonhoeffer’s charge that Barth erred in opting for “a positivism of revelation”). I think Bonhoeffer was objecting to Barth’s variation on a ‘from above’ methodology and perspective.