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If ethics is to attest God's grace to humanity (the ethics of human confirmation of divine grace) rather than betraying it (the ethics of human self‐assertion), then it must be carried out as the investigation of human life and conduct from the standpoint of the revelation of the Word and work of God's grace in Jesus Christ and thus as a part of dogmatics. This approach differs from most contemporary approaches in moral theology, which ground ethics either in reason or nature in relative independence from dogmatics or in the life of the church. This chapter reconstructs Barth's position in response to criticisms that it is remote from the concrete contexts in which moral issues arise, that it does violence to ethics, and that it accords no legitimacy to nontheological approaches to ethics.

This chapter examines Barth's understanding of the nature and task of dogmatics, looking first at an informal but programmatic presentation he gave to faculty colleagues, followed by the prolegomena to his dogmatics lectures in Göttingen. Barth situates the task of dogmatics between a scholastic scientia de Deo, on the one hand, and a Schleiermacherian Religionswissenschaft, on the other. However, his eschatological focus makes it difficult to develop an account of dogmatics that avoids either making it part of the revelation event itself (along the lines of preaching), or opposing it to that event. The task of dogmatics is then to problematise the identity between preaching and the Word of God. In conclusion, a contrast is drawn with Barth's later lectures on John's Gospel, where his attention to the Johannine idea of witness encourages him to develop a more positive description of acts of human testimony to revelation.

By attending to his doctrine of the incarnation, it is easy to acquit Barth of the charge that his christology is conceptually incapable of giving sufficient account of the humanity of Jesus. Nevertheless, Barth's main concern in his Göttingen Dogmatics is to avoid historicising christology in such a way as to isolate this moment in what is a trinitarian movement. This concern can be observed, generally, in his desire to hold together christology and soteriology, or else in his preference for a Reformed version of the doctrine of the hypostatic union. However, in accentuating the eschatological character of revelation, Barth finds it hard to make sufficient sense of the resurrection of Jesus; put differently, the pastness of the resurrection is virtually collapsed into the actuality of revelation itself, thus depriving the latter of its objective grounds.

This concluding chapter takes up the line of argument pursued throughout the rest of the book by suggesting that Barth's theology in Göttingen is best explained in terms of his awareness of the eschatological character of grace. This understanding of grace underpins the way in which he renders individual components of his dogmatics, as well as its central structural features. It remains an open question whether the ‘empty space’ Barth leaves in his dogmatics for grace serves to bring the latter into focus, or whether grace is marginalised to such a degree that its very reality becomes questionable, generating the various dilemmas that have been indicated previously in the book.

This chapter focuses on Schleiermacher's mature dogmatics, The Christian Faith, and the “eternal covenant” between faith and science, which this work was intended to advocate. The chapter sets Schleiermacher's theological work against the background of the rise of conservative neopietism in Prussia and argues that Schleiermacher's intention was to encourage Christians to accommodate rather than resist the advance of scientific knowledge of both the natural order and religion. The chapter argues that the account of Christianity presented in The Christian Faith has two components, a naturalistic “base” and a theological “overlay” that is not confined to naturalistic claims. The chapter then defends the claim that the basal understanding of religion presented in the dogmatics can be classified as an example of religious naturalism against objections, while conceding that Schleiermacher's discussion of the Incarnation does not clearly succeed in avoiding conflicts with science.

A great deal of attention is given to the revised version of Barth’s prolegomena lectures published in 1927 under the title Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf in treatments of Barth’s development. However, a synchronic comparison, section by section, of all three versions of the prolegomena (the Göttingen and Münster versions together with Church Dogmatics I/I and I/2) shows the extent of which the fundamental decisions which control even the Church Dogmatics I/I and I/2 were already made in 1924-25 in Göttingen. This chapter discusses the events and works which influenced decisions made by Barth.

Karl Barth’s theology entered a new phase when he adopted the anhypostatic-enhypostatic model of Christology. However, his basic orientation was towards the revelation-event which occurs in the here and now basis of God’s Self-revelation in Christ. Thus, though the ground of his theology was now Christological, his theology was largely pneumatocentric. This is most evident in his doctrine of election, which was centred in the concrete situation of the person who is addressed by revelation in the here and now.

When a posteriori science came into view during the 16th century and had experienced classical developments during the 17th century, this modern science was referred to as dogmatic science. This is because an inductive discovery method that is directed by inquiry took the place of deducting from abstract principles, and because this science enabled various improvements in the real knowledge of the universe. The notion of acquiring ‘dogmatic’ thought was brought about by the differentiation given by the Greeks between the ‘sceptics’ who asked several academic questions and the ‘dogmatics’ who seek to find positive results to these questions. As such, dogmatic science was utilized in analysing the new physics that encompassed a particular field of reality.

This chapter provides some suggestions for evaluating the importance of Newman's Christian vision. Under the guise of discussing Catholic dogmatics, Newman addressed a central modern question: “is the world we make a product of our beliefs, or are our beliefs a product of the world we make?” His unyielding adherence to the perverse proposition that belief precedes action, coupled with his devotion to the antique vocabulary of Catholic disputation, made him unfashionable in his own day and makes him almost unintelligible in the present day. Newman held not only that mind ought to act believingly, but that it does act believingly. Action is only intelligible by reference to belief, and belief is ultimately free and superior to all other categories of explanation. This chapter explores the Apologia which is sometimes called Newman's autobiography.

Hitler ordered that Russia be invaded in June 1941. While the Russians saw more than 4.5 million casualties, Hitler's forces were able to experience substantial gains before the year ended. Also, this was the period in which Hitler initiated the ‘final solution’ that resulted to the death of millions of Jews and gypsies in 1945. Soon, Germany found itself at war with the United States. Since an allied victory seemed impossible, Barth stopped his attempts at furthering the need for resistance to fascism as well as his endeavours to encourage the Christians in Norway and in Holland. It was during this period that Barth expressed what he thought of as the post-war period's special temptations. Barth's open lectures on theology were published as Dogmatics in Outline, and he was also able to compose volumes of his doctrine of creation and other addresses on the Church.

The four volumes of Church Dogmatics which entailed Barth's ideas regarding the notion of reconciliation were written during the period between 1951 and 1959. The fourth part, and the parts that have been unrevised that were written between 1959 and 1961, were then published as The Christian Life. This period marked the German ‘economic miracle’ in which Europe experienced recovery in terms of economy and industry and the standards of living were significantly improved across all countries of central Europe. As such, secularization brought about great impacts in the cultural movement as church attendance was in decline. The ‘end of ideology’ theory was initiated because of the affluence and technological development experienced. In this chapter, we look into how Barth furthered his theology through focusing on how a sense of freedom can be acquired if focus would shift back to religion and the Church.

In the Church Dogmatics, ‘revelation’ plays a central role owing to Karl Barth's endeavour to provide answers to the epistemological problematic arising from the Enlightenment and from the discrediting of Kulturprotestantismus. Before discussing revelation as a correlative concept, this chapter first looks at the functions that the category performs in the Church Dogmatics and then examines why revelation has these functions. Two issues are considered: What form and content does the category of revelation bestow on and receive from the two other categories of event and Trinity? Does the expression of the category of revelation lead us to think of God as one person or three persons? First, the influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ernst Troeltsch in relation to which Barth's endeavour is to be understood is analysed. Secondly, those who perceive that the concept of revelation emerges from the Scriptures and those who reject such a perception are addressed. The correlative and hermeneutical functions of the category of revelation as God's self-interpretation are also discussed.

This chapter examines the agency behind the event of revelation, as set out in the Church Dogmatics. It explores problems surrounding personal divine agency and the question of intentionality. It discusses the category of act and the problematic surrounding a concept of special divine activity. It considers three contrasting understandings of the category of act to illustrate the diversity of the context in which Karl Barth's usage of the category functions. Johann Gottlieb Fichte contrasts ‘Action (pure, autonomous, absolutely initiatory action, grounded solely in itself), and extended matter.’ This understanding of action illustrates the separation of act language from substance language that arises from the abandonment of classical metaphysics as a result of the critique that emerged in the Enlightenment. Thomas Bonhoeffer's understanding of act remains within the post-Enlightenment view, but allows that an act may be said to be temporal in some sense, although he is careful to distinguish between act and being. Martin Heidegger challenges the assumptions of the Enlightenment, and implies that there is a parallel relation between act and being.

The being of God in the Church Dogmatics is characterized by the concepts of act, action, activity, and event, rather than by the language of substance. It is from Karl Barth's understanding that the God of the Bible is alive that he argues that ‘Act means being, and being can only mean act’. God's intentional, self-moved act, which is known in the event of revelation, is understood to be God's interpretation of himself and thus to be the interpretation of God's being. This chapter examines the concept of God's being-in-act in the Church Dogmatics and its ontological implications. First, it looks at the move towards a ‘new’ ontology by observing that action replaces substance language in the Church Dogmatics. It then reviews the concept of actus purus and the related question of the relationship between actuality and potentiality. The chapter concludes by asking if the event of God as stated by Barth may be interpreted as an act of relationality.

The different concepts of relationality that may be applied to the Godhead imply differing understandings of the concept of divine personhood. The notion of an event of communion that we are using as a controlling theological concept by which to analyse and interpret Karl Barth's notion of the triune Godhead in the Church Dogmatics is used by John Zizioulas to encapsulate the understanding of the divine personhood and relationality in the tradition of Byzantine Orthodoxy, which is to be traced to the Cappadocian fathers. This chapter examines two different models of divine relationality: first, the relationship between the Godhead and the creation, in particular the human creature, and second, any relationship that may be said to exist within the Godhead itself. These two models of divine relationality are by no means mutually exclusive. Indeed, it might be argued that any inner divine relationality almost necessitates an outer relationship with something other than the divine. When either of these two models of relationality is taken to an extreme, however, the implications for divine personhood are considerable.