In the academic discipline of textual criticism, it is often said that manuscripts should be weighed and not simply counted. What this means is that in attempting to determine the original wording of the Greek text of the New Testament, the number of manuscripts that witness a particular reading is not as important as the age and significance of the manuscripts that give this wording. In brief, many extant manuscripts might possess the same reading, but they may all have been later copies that include a demonstrably mistaken transcription of an even earlier text. In this regard, a few earlier manuscripts may be much more significant for determining a reading than many later ones, for numerous later copies are less important than the existence of early documents closer in time and fidelity to the original. The point is simply that number does not overshadow substance, and the quality of references is more significant than their quantity.
Something similar should be remembered when one looks at Karl Barth's evaluation of Luther and Calvin. If one were simply to assess the most important engagement with Luther by Barth in the crude terms of frequency of references to Luther himself, then the most important work by Barth on Luther would be the lectures he gave very early in his academic career in Göttingen in the winter semester of 1922–23 for a course on Zwingli, with his lectures on Calvin in the previous summer semester of 1922 a distant second.Footnote 1 With regard to references to Calvin, these two works could simply be reversed, with The Theology of Calvin lectures containing the most references to the Reformer, and the Theology of Zwingli lectures coming in second.Footnote 2 Barth's early historical and theological attention to Luther and Calvin as figures in their own right would never be replicated on the scale or with the intensity of these early lectures. Yet Barth's mature understanding of Luther and Calvin far outstrips these lectures in significance of judgement even while demonstrating lines of continuity in assessment. In truth, Barth's early lectures were, by his own later admission, the result of feverish work to master the foundational thinkers of Reformed theology – a tradition that he belonged to in name but which did not truly know.Footnote 3 Hence, his first theological lectures were historical studies of Calvin, Zwingli and the Reformed Confessions (and the Heidelberg Catechism) in order to understand the Reformers themselves and the Reformed heritage. This is what occupied him during his early years in Göttingen.Footnote 4
For all of the importance of Barth's examination in these lectures of Luther's interaction and influence with regard to Zwingli and Calvin, it would be a mistake to see this early period as the one where Barth was most indebted to Luther for his own thought and where Luther displayed the most influence upon his work. In these early lectures on Zwingli and Calvin, Barth was learning a tradition, and his engagement with Calvin and Zwingli entailed a new concentration on the theology of Luther as well, for, as the pre-eminent first-generation Reformer who influenced both, his significance could not be ignored. Barth wrestled with Luther's thought especially in the Zwingli lectures as he examined the debates on the Lord's Supper that came to a head at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529 and pondered the inability of Zwingli and Luther to reach agreement there on sacramental questions. In a very important respect, at this juncture Luther was for Barth primarily a character in a debate with Zwingli, and thus a foil for the Reformed tradition that Barth was attempting to learn and make his own. His research led not only to the production of these Zwingli lectures, but also to the important essay of 1923, ‘Luther's Doctrine of the Eucharist: Its Basis and Purpose’, where he brought to culmination his reflections on Luther's position on the Lord's Supper and connected these sacramental convictions to other important theological questions that would continue to haunt his lifelong reflection on Luther and the Lutheran tradition.Footnote 5
Just as significant for understanding Barth's estimation of Luther as these extensive interactions with him in the Zwingli and Calvin lectures are his weighty (if brief and passing) references to him in the ensuing years. These references portray Luther not predominantly as a historical character in a debate with Zwingli, but as a figure in his own right that turned the course of history in the Reformation and stood not only as the foremost representative of its accomplishment, but as one in a line of faithful witnesses to God and God's revelation.
This assessment of Luther was prefigured in Barth's famous commentary on Romans. In the preface to the second edition (1921), Barth famously mentioned the apostle Paul, Franz Overbeck, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky as significant influences upon his thought.Footnote 6 Notably absent from this initial list were Luther and Calvin. Yet elsewhere in the commentary (as well as in prefaces to later editions) the early importance of both Reformers for Barth is evident, and the reason for this is their exposition of scripture. What Barth discovered in Luther and Calvin was an approach to scripture that engaged the subject matter of the text in a way that was not limited to the historical questions and methods of his contemporaries. In the preface to the second edition, Barth lauded Luther and Calvin's insight into reading scripture in contrast to the historical critics of his own time, citing ‘that creative energy which Luther exercised with intuitive certainty in his exegesis; which underlies the systematic interpretation of Calvin; and which is at least attempted by such modern writers as Hofmann, J. T. Beck, Godet, and Schlatter’.Footnote 7 Similarly, in the preface to the third edition (1922), Barth could commend not only Calvin's biblical exegesis but also the understanding of the inspiration of scripture that gave coherence to his exegetical practice.Footnote 8 These comments and others show that Barth valued Luther and Calvin for both their exegetical approach and their theological understanding of scripture's importance during this period, although their absence from his list of significant influences in the preface to the second edition remains noteworthy.
In a short time, however, Barth's list of important persons began to change. It became a list not of idiosyncratic and eclectic theological (and philosophical?) influences, but of theological heritage and confessional continuity – a theological genealogy of faithful witnesses to God's revelation extended through church history.Footnote 9 A year after the publication of the second edition of the Romberbrief, for example, in the lecture, ‘The Word of God as the Task of Theology’, Barth provided a list of persons that was now marked by the intentional identification of a historic line of faithful witnesses to divine revelation. This is evident in his placement of Luther and Calvin in a genealogy of true theological paragons in which Barth hoped also to situate himself: ‘I would like to conclude this discussion with a historical footnote. If my reflections here are decisive in any way, then the line of ancestors upon which we have to orient ourselves runs through Kierkegaard to Luther and Calvin, to Paul to Jeremiah. Many are used to calling upon these familiar names.’Footnote 10 As Barth emphasised, this list does not include Schleiermacher.Footnote 11 Indeed, Barth was working to identify not only those who belonged in this faithful line of witnesses, but also those who did not, and particularly those who in his view had betrayed the decisive insights of the Reformers.
It should perhaps be noted that in time Kierkegaard himself would drop in Barth's estimation and would not be included on the same plane as the others in this list of faithful witnesses, but of most importance for our present purpose is to register that Barth here holds Luther and Calvin in the highest regard and places them in the same ancestral line as the prophet Jeremiah and the apostle Paul. Yet despite this straightforward commendation of Luther and Calvin, Barth also circumscribes their dignity, demarcating their witness to the truth of God's revelation from revelation itself, insisting that, regardless of their faithfulness, even they can only point to what God alone can do, for ‘our goal is the speaking of God himself’.Footnote 12 This was another conviction Barth would hold to the end, and it was a thoroughly dialectical one. On the one hand, the Reformers were of pre-eminent importance, standing in the line of Jeremiah and Paul. Yet on the other hand, they had no true importance except insofar as they gave witness to God's revelation, pointing beyond themselves to this Word that comes from God in their attendance to holy scripture. This recognition of the Reformers as exemplary witnesses to God's revelation by virtue of their service as pre-eminent expositors of holy scripture is the basis of Barth's understanding of Luther and Calvin as church fathers. It is also the basis for his distinction between them and prophets and apostles like Jeremiah and Paul, who, as biblical witnesses, possess an authority Luther and Calvin do not.Footnote 13
Though Barth treated Luther and Calvin as a pair with regard to their importance for the Reformation and their practice of faithful exegesis of scripture, he nevertheless did draw distinctions between them and the confessional traditions that followed in their wake. In his lectures on Calvin in 1922, Barth emphasised the singular role that Luther played for the church's Reformation, writing:
The man who thought out first, and with most originality and force, the basic antimedieval and, as we saw last time, the basic antimodern thought of the Reformation, that of the theology of the cross, was neither Zwingli nor Calvin but Luther. Both Zwingli and Calvin learned from Luther, not without at once contradicting him, not without giving their own shape to what they learned, yet learning from him at the decisive point. Luther's Reformation was not the whole Reformation. It was not even the source or place of origin of the whole Reformation. Nevertheless, it initiated the movement which characterizes the whole and of which the Reformation of Zwingli and Calvin was primarily a repetition, even though a second turn was given to the Reformation in and with the repetition.Footnote 14
Barth also, however, praised Calvin for moving beyond Luther, stating that Calvin emphasised not only justification as Luther did, but also sanctification; not only faith, but obedience; and thus not only the vertical but the horizontal elements of the Christian life.Footnote 15 Moreover, Barth could look awry at what he esteemed to be Luther's emphasis upon faith and subjectivity,Footnote 16 as well as what Barth esteemed Luther's casual demarcation and even confusion of revelation and the creaturely medium taken up for God's self-manifestation.Footnote 17 Nevertheless, Barth also maintained in his early lectures that Luther and Calvin, and their respective emphases, were both necessary and complementary for understanding the Reformation accomplishment and for evangelical witness to the gospel.Footnote 18
If in fact there was a substantive advantage to the Reformed tradition over the Lutheran in Barth's estimation, it was comprised of two primary elements: first, that whereas Luther discovered a material principle (justification by faith) in scripture, Calvin emphasised the formal principle of scripture as the rule of all faith and life; and second, that whereas Luther's focus was upon questions of salvation and faith (i.e. soteriology), Calvin's was upon questions of God and truth (i.e. theology proper), and this in turn protected the Creator–creature distinction more carefully than Luther had done, as well as prioritising christology over anthropology. In truth, Barth's estimation of Luther was always marked by both deep appreciation and an undeniable ambivalence.Footnote 19 Yet, Barth's ultimate judgement was that Luther and Calvin were, in the end, partners in a common project of church reformation. What Paul, Luther and Calvin all have in common, Barth consistently argued, is a recognition of and insistence upon the movement of God to humanity that must precede and frame any talk of our movement and obedience towards God.Footnote 20 It was, even more fundamentally, a recognition of the lordship of God in all matters of salvation, a recognition that in turn demanded a decision.Footnote 21 It is this common declaration of God's singular lordship by Luther and Calvin, along with their corresponding confession of the singular authority of scripture, that makes them fathers of the church.Footnote 22 Barth articulated this exact conviction more than a decade later in the weightiest passage that he provides on Luther and Calvin as paired Reformers, to which we will now turn.
Barth's mature estimation of Luther and Calvin
While Luther and Calvin are important interlocutors throughout Barth's Church Dogmatics, the most sustained and significant discussion of them in their own right occurs relatively early in that massive work. In the second part of the first volume, Barth examines holy scripture in three sections (§19–21). In the second of these, he discusses the authority of scripture and the corresponding authority of the church. He locates three specific areas where the authority of the church is exercised under the authority of scripture: first, in confessing the parameters of the biblical canon and thus effectively setting forth its constituent books; second, in recognising exemplary expositors of the Bible and holding them up before the church for her instruction as authoritative teachers; and, third, in producing confessions of a common faith and establishing them as formal articulations of what has been heard in holy scripture, these confessions thus possessing a relative authority under the authority of scripture itself.Footnote 23 Barth's discussion of Luther and Calvin occurs in the second of these three sections, where he begins simply by acknowledging the existence of such teachers:
We assume that between the Church now and here and the Church then and elsewhere there exists a unity of confession in respect of the authority of the word of specific ecclesiastical teachers, i.e., specific expositors and preachers of the Bible, whose word has in fact emerged from all the words of other expositors and preachers and spoken to the Church of their day and of a later day, and still speaks to the present-day Church, in a way which cannot be said of other teachers of their own or other periods.Footnote 24
While the existence of such teachers is not a theological necessity for Barth, he nevertheless notes that the church recognises ‘that there are “Church fathers” and that these fathers have a definite ecclesiastical authority’.Footnote 25 He argues, however, that such figures are not to be thought of in the same sense as church fathers are in Catholic thought. The Reformation did not recognise earlier prestigious teachers as part of a rigid hierarchical ranking of theological authority or as a ‘second source of revelation’.Footnote 26 Nevertheless, the evangelical tradition does recognise church fathers when these are rightly defined; moreover, Barth's remarkable claim is not just that there are church fathers, but that these fathers are, pre-eminently and singularly, Luther and Calvin themselves. They are, for Barth, the quintessential church fathers, for reasons we will examine below.
This identification of Luther and Calvin as church fathers does not entail, however, that their persons are held to be of particular interest. Indeed, Barth expresses a concern that the Lutheran tradition especially placed too much emphasis upon the person, personality and life of Luther.Footnote 27 With regard to this focus on Luther's person, Barth writes:
Certainly the firm popularity which has been retained by the figure of Luther even in modern developments, and in particular the estimation as an apostle of freedom of conscience or a religious personality or a German which he has been accorded more recently on every possible or impossible count, is no substitute for a recognition of his ecclesiastical signification as a Reformer and Church teacher.Footnote 28
These were no idle words when Barth published them in 1938, for while Luther had been esteemed a towering spiritual personality and religious genius in the nineteenth century, it was during the 1930s that he especially came to be considered as a hero of the German Volk and a nationalist figure.Footnote 29 In Barth's estimation, Luther was misunderstood if identified and thought significant as a religious personality or pious genius, a soldier of reason against medieval superstition, or a national hero or ‘great German’.Footnote 30 Barth had quite simply no interest in Luther as understood in any of these roles, although he well recognised the recurrent temptation to cast him into the image of the contemporary age.Footnote 31 Yet to know Luther in truth was simply to acknowledge him for what he not only was in his time but continues to be: a teacher of the church who was best not celebrated but heard.Footnote 32
One of the things Barth learned from Kierkegaard that never left him was that there is all the difference in the world between a ‘religious genius’ and an apostle.Footnote 33 Barth did not think of Luther and Calvin as apostles, of course, as their writings were not to be included in the canon of holy scripture. Yet as preeminent biblical expositors and teachers, and therefore as church fathers, they were, in their own way, true heirs of the apostles in that they pointed away from themselves to scripture, just as the apostles of scripture pointed away from themselves to Christ.Footnote 34 It is therefore accurate to conclude that, for Barth, Luther and Calvin are fathers of the church because of this analogous relation to the apostles: they are exemplary witnesses to the singular witnesses of the prophets and apostles. It was this unique role, and not the Reformers’ personality, that was decisive. Indeed, Barth had no place for hero worship and already in 1923 wrote in regard to a witness to revelation: ‘The human does not come into consideration, not even as a prophet, never mind as a Christian hero but rather as a minister, as a servant of the divine Word.’Footnote 35
This attitude meant that Barth put very little weight upon anniversaries commemorating the Reformers. He had little time for a nationalist ‘Deutschen Luthertag’ (German Luther Day) or the 450th anniversary celebrations of Luther's birth in 1933. Nor did he have any real regard for similar celebrations of Calvin's anniversaries. Toward the end of his life, Barth wrote a short piece titled ‘Thoughts on the 400th Anniversary of Calvin's Death’, and he found it no accident (and in fact quite appropriate) that Calvin's grave had been allowed to slip into oblivion but a few years after his passing.Footnote 36 Calvin was not a hero, Barth insisted, and should not be worshipped as one. He was, rather, a witness, a servant of the Word of God – and for Barth, who considered John the Baptist as the paragon of the Christian's vocation of indication, this was the highest compliment he could in fact give Calvin.Footnote 37 As with Luther, Barth had no romanticism when it came to Calvin or his Geneva, nor with the Reformation in general. His criticisms of Calvin could in fact be trenchant, as when in this brief essay he stated that Calvin was ‘undoubtedly stronger when he spoke about faith and obedience than about love and hope’, and was ‘not only a child of his time, but also the prisoner of certain rigidities in his own basic ideas’.Footnote 38 Still, Barth could nevertheless conclude by saying of Calvin that, despite all such ‘necessary criticism and corrections, there is hardly a better teacher, apart from the biblical prophets and apostles, than he’.Footnote 39 In this regard, Barth's estimation of Calvin was no different in 1964 than it was in 1923 when he bemoaned the rise of hero worship with regard to Calvin in the Reformed church.Footnote 40
In summary, for Barth what made Luther and Calvin church fathers was not their forceful and unique personalities, or even the eventfulness of their lives and distinctive accomplishments. What made them church fathers was their divine call and the fulfilment of that vocation as teachers of holy scripture. This focus on their role as pre-eminent expositors of the Bible, and thus as witnesses to that which scripture itself attested rather than as religious personalities, made all of the difference in how they were to be understood. Their importance hinged on the fact that they were called and used by God to restore his word for the church, to teach that word to the church and to bring about the church's renewal. So although it is true that for Barth to say Reformation was to say Luther and Calvin, they were for him church fathers only because of this call and use. One could perhaps say that what Barth valued so much about them was their utter transparency before the word of God in scripture.
The Reformers are therefore positioned by Barth not only in relation to and under the prophets and the apostles, and thus holy scripture (what we might call a vertical relation), but also as witnesses among a cloud of church witnesses (what we might call a horizontal relation). He notes that while holy scripture stands over all secondary tradition, it is nevertheless the case that scripture speaks to every generation and individual as it finds itself within the company of the church, among those fellow pupils of scripture who include all of its members. We therefore hear the echo of scripture not first in our own voice but in the voice of others who precede us in the faith. Yet while that company of teachers may appear boundless, Barth proffers that not all voices are to be heard in the same way, for some witnesses speak in such a way that ‘others had and still have to listen to them’. He continues, ‘And basically the older and more experienced fellow-pupil is simply the Church teacher’.Footnote 41 Pre-eminent among these teachers are Luther and Calvin.
Not only must such teachers therefore be identified, they must be heeded, though not slavishly obeyed or mimicked. To refuse to listen to such exemplary voices in a kind of emancipated biblicism, Barth contends, is not to read the Bible in freedom but to succumb to a captivity of our own subconscious convictions in our interpretation. To read the Bible freely is, perhaps ironically, to read it under the tutelage of church teachers.Footnote 42 In this light, it becomes clear that Barth rejects not only a traditionalism that saw the Bible and tradition as two parallel sources of truth, but also a biblicism that cut itself off from all tradition and prior voices altogether. As he writes:
In actual fact, there has never been a Biblicist who for all his grandiloquent appeal directly to Scripture against the fathers and tradition has proved himself so independent of the spirit and philosophy of his age and especially of his favourite religious ideas that in his teaching he has really allowed the Bible and the Bible alone to speak reliably by means or in spite of his anti-traditionalism.Footnote 43
In contrast, the biblicism of the Reformers, for all of their calls for the supremacy of scripture, differed from this modern biblicism, and ‘not in spite but in application of the Evangelical Scripture principle it kept itself free from this anti-traditionalism’.Footnote 44
We might assess Barth's position as follows: what made the evangelical (i.e. Protestant) church unique was not its recognition of an ecclesiastical authority expressed in ‘specific teachers of the church’, but rather its definition of a church father predicated on singular witness to the truth of scripture rather than antiquity, along with the claim that it was the Reformers who rightly received this title. It goes without saying that such judgements are contentious and thus may be contested. Important for our purpose here is simply to register that Barth holds in tension the absolute authority of scripture and the relative authority of the Reformers in a nuanced dialectic that judges the quality of Christian witness not on antiquity but on something akin to Kierkegaard's notion of contemporaneity with Christ, yet one effected from God's side. In the time of the Reformation, God called forth Luther and Calvin for the church's renewal through a fresh and decisive hearing of the Word of God. This estimation is evident when Barth writes:
If our Churches confessed that they were reformed by the Word of God and not simply by Luther and Calvin, their reformation did take place by the witness borne to them by Luther and Calvin. Therefore the witness of Luther and Calvin is decisive and essential for their existence as this Church, as the Churches reformed in this way, and therefore for the whole contingency of their existence as the Church of Jesus Christ.Footnote 45
Barth then concludes: ‘If they free themselves from this witness they are no longer these Churches and therefore no longer contingently the Church of Jesus Christ.’Footnote 46
Barth's argument here hangs on a delicate balance and decisive distinction between absolute and relative authority, as well as one between necessity and contingency. It is also predicated on a firm sense of ecclesiality grounded in a divine election and providence that calls not only the church, but also its teachers and reformers, into existence. His claim is not that the Reformers Luther and Calvin hold the same authority as scripture, for scripture possesses an absolute authority, but rather that this absolute authority is always expressed in any time through the teaching of a relative authority; and for the evangelical churches this is pre-eminently the teaching of Luther and Calvin. While the existence of such teachers is not necessary for the act of revelation itself, revelation nevertheless in actual fact comes to establish such teachers to serve as witnesses to it; and their appearance is not simply the result of the contingent fact of their historical genius, but rather is grounded in the necessity of God's eternal election and providence. Moreover, while the church is necessarily predicated on its founding by Jesus Christ and his rule of it through holy scripture, this too takes place through the contingencies of history, such that the evangelical church cannot be recognised for what it is, nor understood as a church of Jesus Christ, apart from the witness – found pre-eminently in Luther and Calvin – to the exemplary teaching of scripture that provides its bearing and identity. It is in this circumscribed yet crucial way – as a relative and contingent yet real, concrete, and indeed providentially ordered authority – that the witness of Luther and Calvin stands over that of the other teachers and traditions of the evangelical churches.Footnote 47
Of course, the fact that such authorities are not absolute but relative requires that they are themselves open to correction in light of the word of God, and Barth's esteem of Luther and Calvin did not lead him to an uncritical reverence for them, as we have seen. Moreover, that they are relative authorities entails the possibility that they could in time be superseded.Footnote 48 Yet while theoretically possible, Barth judges this eventuality practically unlikely (and, indeed, difficult to imagine, because he has grounded their appearance in divine providence). Barth therefore states that, despite the calls of modern sceptics, Luther and Calvin have rightly retained their central place for the Protestant churches.Footnote 49 They set the standard for the recognition of other church fathers past and present, because they correctly taught the word of God and were used and confirmed by God in the reformation and renewal of the church at a decisive turning point in its history. For this reason, other teachers are rightly judged in light of their teaching.Footnote 50
This supremacy of Luther and Calvin does not mean, however, that the list of teachers of the church is closed. At the same time, although for Barth there is every reason to expect the emergence of church teachers beyond Luther and Calvin, Barth maintains that very few teachers are in truth church fathers like Luther and Calvin; for, as he writes, ‘This real guidance of the Church, as it was exercised by Luther and Calvin, is a rare thing’.Footnote 51 Thus, rather than identifying actual examples of further teachers, Barth lists four criteria that must be met for a person to be recognised as a teacher of the church of this magnitude. First, such a person must be an expositor of holy scripture who, like the Reformers, has helped the church rightly understand the word of God; second, such a person must be in accordance with the confession of the Reformation, for the Reformers set the standard for such confession; third, such a person must speak as a teacher to and for the whole church and not simply for a segment of it; and finally, such a person must, in agreement with the Reformers and with responsibility to the church, speak a word of decision for the church and call it to confession.Footnote 52
As we have already witnessed, Barth dialectically balances recognition of the real authority of such teachers with a great wariness regarding attention that is to be paid to them as persons. He hints that an overenthusiasm for church teachers raises the same spectre of danger as the angel worship warned about by Paul in Galatians 4. Moreover, he holds that when the Reformers are revered as persons, the church may become more Lutheran and Calvinist, but it will then become, correspondingly, less Christian and evangelical.Footnote 53 In the end, ‘the authority of a human doctor of Holy Scripture’ can be predicated not of the person but only of his task, which is ‘to acquaint his pupils not so much with himself as with the object which is his and their concern, to point and bind them not so much to himself as to this object’.Footnote 54 And just as it is the object of the message and not the voice of the teacher that is of ultimate importance, so also, similarly, the voice of the teacher is not ultimately his own, but the voice of the church of his time. Such a teacher speaks for the church, for scripture and the confession of the church are not judged by the standard of the teacher, but the teacher by the standard of scripture and the church's confession.Footnote 55 We pay teachers their proper due, Barth insists, precisely when we honour God and not them, and thus when we place ourselves under them insofar as they themselves are placed under scripture and witness to what it attests: God's very revelation and salvation, which call forth our faith and decision – the same decision impressed upon and made by the Reformers themselves.Footnote 56
With all of these observations in view, it should not surprise us that Barth refused to equate faithfulness to Luther and Calvin with simple repristination of their theology.Footnote 57 What is required to honour the Reformers is not mimicry but reflection, interpretation and, if carefully understood, translation – perhaps even correction: ‘Not those who repeat the doctrine most faithfully, but those who reflect upon it most faithfully so that they can then expound it as their own doctrine, are their most faithful pupils.’Footnote 58 This means that for Barth ad fontes could never entail a simple preservation and repetition of the past:
The Church of today would not be accepting them if it were simply accepting or reproducing them in their historical form. It would be accepting them not as the Church of today, not obedient to its own calling along the lines of the Reformation, but as an institute of antiquities – the worst dishonour of which it could be guilty for all its well-meant veneration.Footnote 59
Years later in a conversation, Barth asserted that Luther and Calvin themselves were not ‘museum directors’, and that he had no interest in being one himself.Footnote 60 Along with the ecclesial confession, the teacher of the church exercises a real if circumscribed and qualified authority.Footnote 61 Yet that authority is not so much possessed as witnessed, and thus is best exercised when never claimed, and most honoured when consulted but not simply imitated. As Barth later iterated this point in his short piece reflecting upon Calvin's death: ‘It is not worth while really to become a “Calvinist”, but it certainly is almost singularly worth while to become Calvin's free pupil.’Footnote 62 In fairness, Barth held the same standard for himself. If you meet a Barthian, he could later say, tell them that I am not one.Footnote 63
There are nevertheless a number of tensions that remain in Barth's explication of the role and authority of church teachers. Certainly the fact that the Reformers are both contingent historical persons whose viewpoints could be corrected in light of further reflection upon scripture, yet also at the same time persons whose appearance was grounded in a providential and divine ordination, creates complexity in understanding the nature of their authority – an authority Barth situates precisely between unquestioned obeisance and indifferent dismissal. He esteemed church tradition as both necessary and relative, even as others esteemed it as entirely contingent or as absolute. His articulation of the authority of Luther and Calvin displays a precarious balance between an abandonment and an absolutising of tradition, both of which he rejected.
Another area of dialectical tension is that Barth had a somewhat circuitous understanding of ecclesial authority with regard to individual teachers and church confessions. The logic of his communal understanding of confession, which stands over individual teachers and believers, is such that one might have expected him to elucidate the authority of confessions before that of the Reformers. Yet he sees the confessional task of the Protestant churches as made possible by the initial renewal to which Luther and Calvin called the churches, and he thereby treats them in his discussion of church authority before taking up the question of the authority of the confessions. Here Barth seems to follow a chronological rather than ontological ordering of the authority of the confession and the individual teacher: in truth, confessions have an authority that exceeds that of the individual reformer or theologian; but for Barth the church fathers Luther and Calvin stand before the confessions in the sense that they made such confession of the church possible in their wake. In this, Barth may be less consistent with his dogmatic ordering of relative authorities but nevertheless more honest in his assessment of the Protestant confessions themselves with regard to the circumstances of their actual historical appearance.
The ‘end’ of historical study
Perhaps no person has been as laudatory of the Reformers’ ecclesiastical role while being relatively disinterested in their actual material lives as was Barth. This may make him a reluctant historian of the Reformers, but it does not jeopardise his faithful witness to their intention and spirit. In effect, he wanted to understand the Reformers as they understood themselves. This entailed attending to what they themselves attended to rather than fixating upon the Reformers themselves as historical figures. Even as a confessional Reformed theologian and church member, Barth had no interest in esteeming Calvin simply as an ancestor of his own tradition.Footnote 64 Commenting on the meaning of Reformed confessional identity in 1923, Barth concluded:
Remaining true to the Fathers must mean, then, adhering precisely to history the way they themselves adhered to it: letting history speak but only as an indication beyond itself to revelation, not confusing age with originality, and not confusing the authority that is given to the Church with the authority by which the church was founded.Footnote 65
The most important thing about Luther and Calvin for Barth was therefore not the material content they provided on specific theological questions (as important as this may be), but the exemplary role they played in calling the church back to the word of God and the supremacy of scripture. In this regard, the fact that Barth had so little interest in them as historical figures is understandable: he saw them as exemplary solely because they displayed unwavering focus upon the subject matter that had captured their lives and compelled their testimony in speech and life. He had no regard for Luther or Calvin as historical geniuses but only as secondary witnesses to the primary witness of scripture in attesting God's revelation.Footnote 66 This was the path he followed in his own work.Footnote 67
Barth's stance amounts to a rejection of hagiography of historical figures, but its significance runs much deeper and is much more disturbing: it is ultimately an attack not only upon uncritical historical hero worship, but upon historical science itself when it is set forth as an academic discipline for its own sake and forsakes the theological setting and purpose of its practice. Barth's construal of historical investigation is, in short, a rejection of any independent discipline of church history that does not find its place in the richer conception of the church's theological task that moves from explication (biblical theology), to meditation (dogmatic theology), to application (practical theology).Footnote 68 His understanding and estimation of Luther and Calvin are thereby predicated upon and indeed reveal the underlying rationale of his insistence that church history is indeed necessary but can only be an ancillary theological discipline that does not stand alongside of but must rather serve biblical, dogmatic and practical theology. Historical study is never for the church an end in itself, because its service, however necessary, is always merely preparatory to the ultimate task of the church's proclamation and confession.
This estimation of historical study when approaching figures of the church's past is in fact parallel to and in perfect accordance with Barth's views on historical criticism and its place in biblical interpretation.Footnote 69 Church history, like historical criticism, is an indispensable preparatory though subsidiary discipline that must push on to richer theological investigations that do not make either the historical world of the Bible or the figure of church history ends of study in themselves, but which rather serve the subject matter of the divine revelation to which both scripture and its teachers testify. Just as Barth denounced an objective historical criticism when esteemed by its practitioners to be the self-sufficient and final method to understand scripture, so he also undermined any field that makes Luther and Calvin objects of independent historical interest and fails to take account of their proper vocation as witnesses and church fathers. To treat scripture or such later witnesses to the gospel in this way is, in Barth's parlance, to treat them as abstractions: not as what they truly are in the divine economy, but as independent objects of study. For this reason, Barth read the Reformers analogously to how he read the scriptures: not as interesting objects of historical investigation in their own right, but as witnesses that point beyond themselves to the subject of their witness.
However much Barth's approach to historical investigation may grate against modern critical and academic sensibilities, it provides a challenge precisely because of such marked iconoclasm. It is difficult to deny that in the contemporary age much historical research has become the examination of trees with little consideration of the forest – an examination that, in turn, dissects the trees themselves into a multifarious array of ever more particulate source material. In such a world, not only texts but their authors are dissolved into a viscous amalgam of background sources and constitutive tributaries of prior influences, with meaning itself often dissolved in the process. We live in a world of scholarship that is trained to look at things and refract them into a seemingly endless number of dispersed constituent background elements, not to look along with them to what they indicate.Footnote 70
In pushing against this way of approaching scripture and history, Barth was pushing against much of the modern age and its dominant historiography. Correspondingly, what made Luther and Calvin of interest to Barth was not their lives and accomplishments but the object of their work, and what he shared with them was an undivided commitment to look along with rather than at the witnesses of the church's past and to read them akin to how he read scripture: to think after them (Nachdenken), to face the subject matter (die Sache) with which they were confronted, and to feel and take the weight of their decisions upon his own shoulders.Footnote 71 Once again, Barth's stance here with regard to Luther and Calvin is entirely consonant with Kierkegaard's distinction between a religious genius and an apostle or witness. A religious genius displays the brilliance of an inner insight, the discovery of a truth within the self, the product of an incandescent intelligence or other religious capacity of feeling or conscience. Modern scholarship itself may seek to deconstruct the genius into a collection of prior historical influences, questioning the very idea of a single individual who turns history. A witness like Luther or Calvin, however, points away from himself and from prior history to that which he did not discover on his own. He is rather imposed upon, commissioned, indeed burdened, with a message he not only did not create or discover but would perhaps not even have chosen.Footnote 72 He can only report it and point to it. This is not the celebration of imagination or of intelligence, though both may be present in such a witness. It is rather the rapt attention to a message that overshadows the messenger and applies to him as much as to all who hear it. Historical study may illumine this message, but it does injustice to both the message and messenger if it attempts to drown both in the ever-flowing stream of historical occurrence and its relativising waters. For both Kierkegaard and Barth, this particular practice of historical contextualisation was in fact a subtle way to evade confrontation with the truth to which the witness testifies and with the decision it places before us.
Two things remain for us to ponder in light of Barth's counter-witness to our modern age. First, we are left with the decision whether or not to confront our seemingly irresistible urge to reduce witnesses to geniuses or to historical instantiations of prior sources, rather than to accept the far greater challenge of honestly facing the questions raised by the witnesses themselves.Footnote 73 The second is reckoning with the undeniable fact that today theology has largely become the practice of church history with but few exceptions. Unlike Luther and Calvin, and Barth himself, we do not live in an age of exemplary witness as much as in a golden age of the historical investigation of prior witnesses. There may have been a time when one could justifiably bemoan a ‘retreat to commitment’ as the greatest danger to Christian vitality.Footnote 74 But now, the retreat is not to commitment but to historiography itself as a safe enclave of dispassionate respectability: we are all historians now. Perhaps prior ages were wary of an ascendant philosophy that might overshadow theology's rightful tasks, but philosophy itself has succumbed to the relativism of historical consciousness. It is not philosophy, but history, which now sets the rules for respectability and the game to be played. Trying to understand what has been lost with the triumph of history as the queen of the biblical and theological sciences is no direct slight of critical historical investigation, nor warrant to overlook or dismiss the real gains achieved by its ascendancy, but the question remains valid and pressing nonetheless. Perhaps one place where such questioning may begin is with the recovery of Barth's understanding of church history as a subordinate and supplementary discipline that can serve, but not overtake, the constructive and confessional task of theology in every age. For Barth, historical science, like historical criticism, is not to be abandoned, much less practised shoddily, but it is not the final word, and it must instead find its rightful place in a larger theological framework of meaning and practice. Barth's own hope for resisting the acids of historicism, however, did not lie in a methodological reorientation but in waiting upon God to speak anew through his witnesses of scripture and church – all of which simply reinforces our suspicions that Barth, though very much a modern theologian, stands in this respect far closer to Luther and Calvin than to our own age of critical (and ironic) distance and its commitment to convictional neutrality and scientific method.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that Barth's objections to the historicist readings of scripture, which he pressed so adamantly in the 1920s, could now simply be translated into arguments against how we read witnesses to scripture, whether the Reformers or others. We should not ignore the strange paradox that Barth himself has often been treated in this way, though he would have been as dismayed and perhaps appalled by this as would Luther or Calvin. Yet if Barth has a future beyond a narrow field of academic investigation, it will not be because of a renewed interest in his life for its own sake. It will be because of the manner in which Barth himself disappears and becomes transparent before the witness of scripture, enabling his theology to serve church reform, renewal and confession rather than historical commemoration. For the church lives not by commemoration, but by hope and expectation.
Historical study must take account not only of means but of ends, and the ends one chooses will be perennially contested, though the act of choosing cannot be avoided. If studies of Barth like this one, as well as studies of Luther and Calvin, and of church history generally, are to fulfil their fitting and proper end, they must dare to climb up from the plateau of academic scholarship and respectability to a yet higher level of exploration – or at the very least point to it. If we as theologians cannot help being (and perhaps must be) historians too, then perhaps we might begin to fulfil this latter vocation faithfully when we are not afraid to climb to a higher plane of inquiry and pull the ladder from our historical investigation up after us. But this is meaningful, and indeed possible, only if a ladder has already been dropped down to us from above.
