Cheers for scholasticism

Barth ( CD 1.2) defends the church father’s from Herder’s charges of intellectualism and scholasticism. He sees two objections in Herder’s complaint: a “formal” objection to the meticulousness of patristic Christology, and a “material” objection that the fathers’ categories, especially that of “nature,” turned the incarnation and salvation into a physico-mechanical process.

Barth doesn’t find either charge compelling. For starters, he argues cogently that the whole complicated apparatus of patristic Christology exists to support, explicate, and fend off errors about a very simple declaration, namely, the “Word became flesh.”

He also claims that Herder’s complaints are ill-founded.

To the formal complaint, he says that modern Christology is able to handle things much more simply “because secretly the question had already been simplified, i.e., because by various means and methods people had learned to circumvent the riddle set by the New Testament.” A real engagement with what the New Testament asserts about Jesus and His life at once reveals “burdens” which a theologian may “leave lying” but “which he cannot move without at once being involved in the difficulties evident in the very profound discussions undertaken at this point by the earlier workers.” There is, of course, a valid warning against intellectualism, “but if this warning is meant to put an end to our task or to forbid us taking pains over it, it is sheer folly.”

Contrary to modern critics, further, Barth says that the fathers had “a richer view of God and divine salvation than its modern critics.” Beyond the interest in ethical life (the obsession of Barth’s opponents) and the physical (the obsession attributed to the fathers by the moderns), the fathers were really motivated by the “simple desire to regard Christ in the way in which it found Him attested in the New Testament as Lord of the complete man.”

In the complaint about the “physicalism” of patristic Christology, Barth discerns a neo-Protestant effort to escape into a spiritualism. He draws from Schleiermacher a definition of nature as “the sum of everything that is corporeal, that goes back to what is elementary, in its variously divided appearance, in which all that we denote by it is mutually conditioned. Over against what is divided and conditions in this way, we posit God as the unconditional and absolutely simple.”

Barth responds that what Schleiermacher calls “nature” is actually contained within the concept of nature in the church fathers, but contained only in the sense that “God, because He is God, is also Lord over the physis in this narrower sense.” And for the fathers, what Schleiermacher calls “nature” is contained in the concept of human nature “only so far as man (because he is man) is not only soul or spirit but body too, because he exists not only spiritually and morally, but corporeally also.” It is an “optical illusion” for modern theologians, who are “interested only in the spiritual and moral,” to think “they could catch out the primitive theologians (who were admitted also interest in the physical) in an exclusive interest in the physical.”

Rejecting the patristic categories, neo-Protestantism, Barth argues, cannot say “that Christ is the datum upon which we can reflect and speak as upon the beginning of all Christian thought. It refuses, at bottom, to say what was once said in the formula vere Deus vere homo .”