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 therefore seems more logical to study d. t. in its principal representative, observing once and for all that each of the theologians belongs to it to a greater or lesser degree. If K. Barth’s Römerbrief, which first appeared in the autumn of 1918 but became known above all in the completely revised edition of 1921, made such a great impact, this was particularly because its author was a young theologian (Barth was born in 1886) educated in the liberal school. As a young man Barth belonged to liberalism; he was a pupil of W. Hermann 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, Schleiermacher (v.) and Kitschl (v.), was a phenomenon to be studied according to critical methods and a matter of personal experience with predominantly moral tendencies. Barth’s desire to break away from this current made his Römerbrief famous.
The principles set out in this first work by Barth were clearly formulated in a lecture given in 1922, entitled: The Word of God: the task of theology. Barth’s principal reproach against liberalism was that it ignored God, considering him merely as the prolongation of a human psychological experience. The dialectical current, by contrast, is marked by the expressed resolve to affirm God as the completely distinct One. Sören Kierkegaard’s thought exerted a considerable influence on Barth and on d. t. in general. In the opening lines of the second edition of Römerbrief, Barth acknowledges this without any reticence.
The dialectical apparatus and the problems connected with it were abandoned by Barth around 1930. He regards the work published in 1931 on Anselm’s proof of the existence of God as the beginning of a new period in his thought. In more recent times, beginning with the international meetings in Geneva in 1949, Barth has taken pains to emphasize the development of his thought away from his earlier positions. Barthian thought is organized around a determined reaction against the possibility of human intelligence. 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 reason advanced for not becoming Catholic is simply futile. In the analogy he actually sees an attempt to achieve an impossible synthesis between God and man. In 1934, polemicizing against E. Brenner, formerly his disciple, he defined his position more precisely. Brenner summarizes it as follows: « Neither rational nature, nor the disposition toward culture, nor any other human element can in the slightest be regarded 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 contact (Anknüpfungspunkt) for God’s saving action. This would contradict 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 what belongs to man as man from what belongs to man as sinner), which produces a clear separation of man from God.
Strictly speaking, both before and after Revelation, human knowledge cannot rise as far as God. This profound pessimism concerning human nature and condition ultimately compromises the very existence of a theology. E. Brunner rightly observed: « The analogia entis has nothing specifically Catholic about it; it is the basis of every theology, both Catholic and pagan ». If man is separated from God, God is nevertheless not separated from man. The analogia fidei, which comes to replace the analogia entis, thus enables Barth to insist on the notion of God as the acting subject and on his attributes of sovereignty and freedom. The following synthesis may be offered: if man does not know God, God nevertheless knows man, and this knowledge of man on God’s part 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 being-in-relation. To this first subsistent relation there corresponds, by way of analogy, a second relation, that which 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. Finally, a third relation, analogous to the preceding two, constitutes man’s very being. « Man exists in his free encounter with man, in the lived relation between himself and his neighbor, between the I and the Thou, between man and woman. The isolated man is not man. Humanity means co-humanity ». Therefore, it is only in Trinitarian life and in the being of Christ that we understand man. As several Protestant theologians have pointed out, this analogia relationis in reality contains the analogia entis. Thus Barth can preserve his distinction only by forcing the category of analogia entis, assigning it a meaning that no one except himself gives II. He attributes to the Catholic theologians’ notion of “being” a value (practically univocal) that they, on the contrary, have never attributed to II.
Historically, Barthian thought has had a considerable influence: it freed Protestant theology from the shackles of liberalism. His criticism of liberalism is the most vital element in his work. He showed that the scholarship of a Harnack or a Herrmann was not theology but an arrogant “humanism.” Nevertheless, upon this legitimate opposition Barth attempted a theology which, although it undoubtedly encouraged a renewal of biblical studies, since it did not, on the other hand, respect the scriptural datum, resulted in a doctrine of divine transcendence without real communication, in a Christology that does not fit into our time and our history, and in an anthropology with a decidedly pessimistic background. Beyond the philosophical influences to which Barth was exposed, one must recognize in his work the echo of the Protestant interpretation of the evangelical message: sin which, reaching even to man’s roots, corrupts man in himself and in all his manifestations.