DIALECTICAL THEOLOGY (BARTHIAN). - This expression designates a doctrinal current that emerged in German Protestantism at the end of the First World War.
The theologians Karl Barth, Fr. Gogarten and E. Thurneysen are its founders: united more by a common opposition to an extreme liberalism than by the elaboration of doctrinal principles accepted by all. It seems, therefore, more logical to study dialectical theology in its principal exponent, noting, once and for all, that each of the theologians belongs to it to a greater or lesser degree. If K. Barth's Römerbrief, which appeared for the first time in the autumn of 1918, but became known above all in the completely revised edition of 1921, had such resonance, it was particularly because its author was a young theologian (Barth was born in 1886), educated in the liberal school. In his youth Barth belonged to liberalism, was a pupil of W. Herrmann at Marburg and an enthusiastic disciple of Harnack in Berlin. At the end of his studies, Barth had been completely won over to the cause of the modern school, for which Christianity, after the orientations of Schleiermacher (v.) and of Ritschl (v.), was a phenomenon to be studied according to critical methods and a matter of personal experience with predominantly moral tendencies. The will to break away from that current made Barth's Römerbrief famous.
The principles that this first work of Barth set forth were clearly formulated in a lecture of 1922, entitled: The Word of God: the Task of Theology. The principal reproach that Barth made to liberalism was that of ignoring God, of considering Him only as the prolongation of a human psychological experience. The dialectical current, on the other hand, is marked by the expressed will to affirm God as the completely distinct. On Barth and on dialectical theology in general, the thought of Søren Kierkegaard exercised a notable influence. In the first lines of the second edition of Römerbrief, Barth confesses it without any reticence.
The dialectical apparatus and the problems connected with it were abandoned by Barth around 1930. He regards as the beginning of a new period in his thought the work published in 1931 on the Anselmian proof of the existence of God. Even recently, since the international meetings of Geneva in 1949, Barth has insisted on emphasizing the evolution of his thought from his earlier positions. Barthian thought is organized around a decided reaction against the possibility of human understanding. In the preface to the first book of the Kirchliche Dogmatik, he does not hesitate to say that the analogia entis is an invention of the antichrist and that every other motive adduced for not becoming a Catholic is simply futile. In the analogy he sees, in reality, something like an attempt to realize an impossible synthesis between God and man. In 1934, in polemic with E. Brunner, formerly his disciple, he defined his position more precisely. Here is how Brunner summarizes it: « Neither the rational nature, nor the disposition to culture, nor any other human element can in the least be considered as traces or remnants of a likeness to God lost as a consequence of sin. For the same reason, one cannot admit in man a point of inscription (Anknüpfungspunkt) for the saving action of God. This would go against the thesis of the exclusive action of the Grace of Christ, the center of the scriptural theology of the reformers ». The exclusion of the analogia entis is therefore based on this profound heterogeneity between man and God (in which it is difficult to separate the part of man as man and of man as sinner), which produces a clear separation of man from God.
To speak properly, both before and after the Revelation, man's knowledge cannot raise itself up to God. Such a profound pessimism about the nature and condition of man ends up compromising the very existence of a theology. E. Brunner has rightly noted it: « The analogia entis has nothing specifically Catholic about it; it is the basis of any theology, whether Catholic or pagan ». If man is separated from God, God is nevertheless not separated from man. The analogia fidei that comes to replace the analogia entis thus allows Barth to insist on the notion of God as an operative subject and on His attributes of sovereignty and freedom. The following synthesis can be made: if man does not know God, God nevertheless knows man, and this knowledge of man on the part of God constitutes precisely the fact of faith.
In his more recent works Barth makes extensive use of a new theological category, the analogia relationis, which makes possible a theological understanding of man, founded on the very life of God. God, who is Trinity, is essentially the being in relation. To this first subsistent relation there corresponds, by way of analogy, a second relation, the one that constitutes Christ. Jesus, in fact, is for Barth the relation between the being of God and the being of men. He is God for men. A third relation, finally, analogous to the two preceding ones, constitutes the very being of man. « Man exists in his free encounter with man, in the lived relation between him and his neighbor, between the I and the Thou, between man and woman. The isolated man is not man. Humanity means co-humanity ». Therefore, only in the trinitarian life and in the being of Christ do we understand man. As several Protestant theologians have pointed out, this analogia relationis contains, in reality, the analogia entis. Thus Barth cannot preserve his distinction except by forcing the category of analogia entis, giving it a meaning that no one, himself excepted, gives it. He attributes to the notion of "being" of Catholic theologians a value (practically univocal) that they, on the other hand, have never attributed to it.
Historically, Barthian thought has had a notable influence: it detached Protestant theology from the shackles of liberalism. The criticism he made of liberalism is the most living element in his work. He showed that the science of a Harnack or a Herrmann was not theology, but a presumptuous "humanism." Nevertheless, on this legitimate opposition, Barth attempted a theology that, if it has undoubtedly favored a renewal of biblical studies, having on the other hand not respected the scriptural datum, has flowed into a doctrine of divine transcendence without real communication, into a Christology that does not insert itself into our time and into our history, and into an anthropology with a decidedly pessimistic background. Beyond the philosophical influences that Barth underwent, one must recognize in his work the echo of the Protestant interpretation of the Gospel message: sin which, reaching even to the roots of man, corrupts man in himself and in all his manifestations.