Dogmatics, according to Barth (CD, I, 1), is the correction, clarification, and criticism of church proclamation by measuring proclamation against the Word of God in the Bible.
Dogmatics is a second-order form of thought and reflection. It is not the same as the proclamation of the church; it is a kind of quality-control for church proclamation. The church goes about her business of proclaiming, and the theologian is there to make sure it remains faithful to the standard of proclamation: “according to our understanding of the matter, neither can theology as such claim to be proclamation. It, too, is talk about God to men. Proclamation, however, is its presupposition, its material and its practical goal, not its content or task. Theology reflects upon proclamation. It confronts it as a court of criticism” (p. 51).
What does he mean by “proclamation”?
Barth says, “Proclamation is human speech in and by which God Himself speaks like a king through the mouth of his herald, and which is meant to be heard and accepted as speech in and by which God Himself speaks, and therefore heard and accepted in faith as divine decision concerning life and death, as divine judgment and pardon, eternal law and eternal Gospel both together” (p. 52).
This comes in the form of preaching, which is “the attempt by someone called thereto in the Church, in the form of an exposition of some portion of the biblical witness to revelation, to express in his own words and to make intelligible to the men of his own generation the promise of the revelation, reconciliation and vocation of God as they are expected to be now” (p. 56). And it comes in sacrament: “the symbolical act which is carried through in the Church as directed to the biblical witness of revelation in accompaniment and confirmation of preaching and which is designed as such to attest the event of divine revelation, reconciliation and vocation which does not merely fulfill but underlies the promise” (p. 56). In some way, the church’s life and work as a whole counts as proclamation for Barth.
Dogmatics is necessary because of human fallibility and sin: “The necessity of dogmatics is different from that of church proclamation. Proclamation is required as the execution of God’s command to the Church. Dogmatics is required because proclamation is a fallible human work . . . . [Dogmatics’] datum is . . . the questionable fact that in proclamation God, revelation and faith are talked about by men in human terms – questionable because it is by no means self-evident that this is done in truth and purity, and because the Church cannot shirk the responsibility that it ought to be done in truth and purity. Dogmatics serves preaching by raising this question. It tests the orthodoxy of the contemporary kerygma. Concrete dogma, indeed, is simply the kerygma tested, provisionally purified, and reduced to a correct formula by the Church” (p. 82). Thus, “Dogmatics serves Church proclamation” (p. 83). It is not a higher form of faith or knowledge, not an end in itself; it exists to ensure that the proclamation of the church remains faithful.
As he defines it at the beginning of chapter 7, “Dogmatics is the critical question about dogma, ie, about the Word of God in Church proclamation, or, concretely, about the agreement of the Church proclamation done and to be done by man with the revelation attested in Holy Scripture” (p. 248).
More fully, “The task of dogmatics is the examination of Church proclamation in respect of its agreement with the Word of God, its congruity with what it is trying to proclaim. In the human form of the proclamation offered by the Church, the Word of God should, of course, be present too. This is the claim with which the Church advances its proclamation and also the expectation by which it is surrounded. Dogmatic work begins by taking this claim and expectation with full seriousness, by taking the Church at its word, so to speak, in respect of this claim and this expectation . . . . It tests this undertaking by confronting it critically, by suspending the claim and expectation for a moment to the degree that it dissociates proclamation and the Word of God in thought, not in order to measure the Word of God by its proclamation, but in order to measure its proclamation by the Word of God” (p. 250).
Barth acknowledges that the proclamation of the Church might be measured by all sorts of other criteria: philosophical, political, cultural, etc; but he concludes, “Church proclamation is not an undertaking which can come under other criteria than God’s Word in respect of its content. What is undertaken in it is exempt from the claim to be judged by any philosophy or ethics or politics . . . . the introduction of other criteria here can only mean that the undertaking itself has become a different one, that it ceases to be the Church’s undertaking laid upon it by commission and accompanied by the divine promise. For the introduction of another criterion means renunciation of the believed intention of this undertaking. To the extent that another standard is really applied here and not the Word of God itself, only confusion and destruction can actually result, no matter how true or weighty the other standard may be in and of itself. For the decisive word about its proclamation the Church cannot listen to any other voice than the voice of its Lord” (p. 255).
Barth claims that “the Word of God in the Bible encounters and continually confronts Church proclamation as a judicial authority,” but “the Bible as this supreme authority which addresses the Church is not at all the Bible that is already dogmatically and historically interpreted by the pope or the professor but the Bible that is not yet interpreted, the free Bible, the Bible that remains free in the face of all interpretation.” The criterion of dogmatics cannot be an interpreted Bible because then it would be “a Bible interpreted already in a particular way, a Bible made over to us and thus put as an instrument in our hands” (p. 259).
“What finally counts,” he insists, “is whether a dogmatics is scriptural” (p 287).