The Doctrinal Role of Scriptural Exegesis in Karl Barth’s New Testament Lectures 1921–1925

Abstract

This paper explores the role of biblical exegesis in doctrinal theology. It does so through the lens of Karl Barth’s lectures on New Testament texts given at the University of Göttingen between 1921 and 1925. Contemporary critiques of the 1919 and 1921 editions of his commentary on Romans, particularly his exchange of open letters with Adolf von Harnack in 1923, contributed to several significant developments in Barth’s understanding and practice of biblical exegesis. In this short period, Barth honed his skills in close reading of New Testament texts, achieving a sharper sense of the relation between what New Testament writers said and what their texts now say than he had in Romans.

1. Introduction

In this paper I explore the relationship between biblical exegesis and doctrinal theology. I want to do this in relation to the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1889–1968). There are two reasons why Barth’s early attempts to draw doctrinal proposals out of his readings of New Testament texts may be helpful. The first is that Barth, undoubtedly one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century, played a leading role in reshaping practices of biblical interpretation; capturing the development of his exegetical practice in the process of its most significant evolution sheds light on broader developments in the first half of the last century that have had lasting consequences. The second reason is more important: by focussing on Barth, I want to foster contemporary reflection on how biblical exegesis shapes doctrinal proposals.

For practical reasons and because the period was particularly formative, I will focus on the four years beginning in 1921, when Barth was appointed to his first academic post as an “adjunct” professor of Reformed Theology at the University of Göttingen, ending with his move to a Chair at the University of Münster in 1925. Within this short period, Barth’s practice of biblical exegesis underwent significant change before reaching a hermeneutical staging post in Barth’s final lectures in Göttingen on Christian Dogmatics. With more space, it would be possible to extend this review to 1932 and the publication of the first part volume of his Church Dogmatics which dealt with The Doctrine of the Word of God but even without doing so, the main lineaments of Barth’s changing practice will be apparent.

2. Dogmatics and Exegesis: Barth and von Harnack

Barth’s reputation as a dogmatic theologian has now all but overshadowed his work as a biblical exegete. But it was the publication in 1918 of his Commentary on Romans that put him on the theological map and the publication in 1921 of a heavily revised second edition that made him one of the best-known Protestant theologians of the time. It was his New Testament exegesis then, not his doctrinal theology, that first earned him the offer of an academic position. Barth would later draw an analogy between the impact of his Romans and the occasion when, during a nocturnal expedition to a church as a child, he accidentally pulled the bell rope and woke the whole village.

The few New Testament scholars who reviewed the first edition were highly critical of it. Adolf Jülicher wrote of it that “[m]uch, perhaps very much may someday be learned from this book for the understanding of our age, but scarcely anything new for the understanding of the “historical” Paul” (Robinson 1968, pp. 72–73). Barth was sufficiently provoked by this comment that in the preface to the second edition he made a point of responding to it: “I have been accused of being “an enemy of historical criticism”. Such language seems to me nervous and high-strung… I have nothing whatsoever to say against historical criticism. I recognize it and once more state quite definitely that it is both necessary and justified” (Barth 1968, p. 6). For Barth, historical critical biblical commentary—at least as practiced by his contemporaries—confined itself to “an interpretation of the text which seems to me to be no commentary at all, but merely the first step towards a commentary” (Barth 1968, p. 6). Recent commentary, he thought, often tasked itself with merely with reconstructing the biblical text, clarifying matters of translation and making the text historically and psychologically intelligible. By contrast, he continued, one should compare this with John Calvin’s exegesis in which “Paul speaks and the man of the sixteenth century hears. The conversation between the original record and the reader moves around the subject matter, until a distinction between yesterday and today becomes impossible” (Barth 1968, p. 7). An interpreter, he concluded, must see through and beyond the historical into the spirit of the text.

Barth’s attitude to historical critical exegetical study of biblical texts and to history generally perturbed Adolf von Harnack. Harnack had been a colleague and personal acquaintance of Karl Barth’s father, Fritz Barth, who had been Professor of Early and Medieval Church History at the University of Berne. Indeed, once or twice Harnack had been a guest in the Barth family home. In the winter semester of 1906/7, Barth had studied the book of Acts with Harnack at the University of Berlin. After the First World War, Barth said or wrote on several occasions that seeing Harnack’s name among the 93 signatories of a manifesto of academics, musicians, and writers in a famous manifesto in support of the German invasion of Belgium was the point at which he realised the bankruptcy of the liberal theology to which he had subscribed up to that point. And so, when in 1923 Die Christliche Welt published an open letter by Harnack containing “Fifteen Questions to those among the theologians who are despisers of scientific theology” (deliberately echoing Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to its cultured despisers), Barth wrote at once to Harnack to ask if he had him particularly in mind. When Harnack replied that he did, Barth responded by publishing “Fifteen Answers to Professor von Harnack”. The exchange of open letters captures succinctly the issues at stake in what Harnack identifies as a dangerous trend in some recent theology respecting the role of historical knowledge and critical reflection in interpreting the Bible. For our purposes, the key questions in this exchange are the first two, and question 14. In question 1, Harnack asked whether the religion or the revelation of the Bible is unequivocally clear. Or, if not, can that revelation be determined by an individual reader’s subjective experience? Or is it the case that, in order to understand the Bible, historical knowledge and critical reflection are necessary. In question 2, Harnack continued by asking whether the meaning of biblical texts is neither self-evident nor so mysteriously intangible that the human mind cannot grasp it without a mystical event. He answers his own question by asserting that neither of these two options are is true; rather, one needs historical and critical reflection in addition to an open mind and heart. Harnack’s 14th question is worth citing in full:

If the person of Jesus Christ stands in the centre of the gospel, how can the basis for a reliable and common knowledge of this person be gained other than through historical critical study, lest we exchange the real Christ for one we have imagined? But how else can this study be accomplished than by scientific theology?

(Robinson 1968, p. 166)

In answer to these three questions on the contribution of historical knowledge to biblical interpretation, Barth’s reply is somewhat gnomic. For Barth, the truly scientific (German Wissentschaftlich—in English we’d probably say “historical” or “objective”) quality that theology has can only derive from the revelation by God of God. This has nothing to do with religious experience but depends entirely on the extent to which the faithful reader of the Bible remembers that the God who is the proper object of theology was once its subject. For Barth, religious experience on the one hand, and historical knowledge and critical reflection on the other, may present possibilities for understanding the Bible, but they may equally be indifferent to, or even obstacles to, true understanding. This is because the Bible is not in the end understood by the intellect but by the power of the Spirit received in faith. In answer to Harnack’s fourteenth question, Barth states that the real contribution that historical knowledge of Jesus makes to a faithful interpretation of the Bible is to establish beyond doubt how little one may know Christ without the help of the Holy Spirit. For Harnack, historical study is essential if one is to uncover the historical Jesus and his teaching; historical study blows away the fog of doctrine to reveal the real Jesus. In a subsequent clarificatory note, Harnack summed up his critique of what he took to be Barth’s approach to exegesis by saying “You transform the theological professor’s chair into a pulpit” (Robinson 1968, p. 171). In stark contrast, Barth held that the idea historical study could reveal Christ amounted to the intellectual equivalent of salvation by works; faith alone, a work of God’s Spirit, can reveal Christ. Harnack considered Barth’s approach to biblical exegesis dangerous; it collapsed the distinction between preaching and critical reflection; it made theological education irrelevant; and, in proposing that the gospel has as little to do with culture as barbarism, Barth’s approach to biblical exegesis denied all the moral and cultural achievements of civilization since the Enlightenment.

The battle lines drawn in the Harnack–Barth conflict have coloured many subsequent treatments of Barth’s understanding of the role of biblical exegesis in doctrinal theology. That, however, is unfortunate, because partly in light of Barth’s ongoing reflection on criticisms of his Romans including Harnack’s, and partly in light of his move from a “parish” setting to a university teaching post, Barth made several subtle but significant changes both to his exegetical practice and in his understanding more generally of the doctrinal function of role of exegesis.

3. Dogmatics and Exegesis: Barth’s Early Teaching

Barth’s first years as a professor of theology proved very challenging. The theological Faculty at Göttingen was Lutheran and many of Barth’s colleagues in the faculty were sceptical about the need for a chair in Reformed theology, especially one funded by American Presbyterian money. Barth’s family, particularly his wife Nellie, struggled to adapt to the move from Switzerland to Germany and from the life of a village parsonage to a city and a university. Barth, who had not undertaken University study beyond a first degree, felt acutely his lack of training. Each semester he gave two lecture courses. For two hours a week over his four years at Göttingen, Barth taught chronologically first through the “founding fathers” of Reformed theology; for example, with lecture series on Calvin and Zwingli, and then through the foundational Reformed confessions. In the winter semester of 1924–1925, after several prickly arguments with his faculty colleagues, he gave an incomplete lecture series on doctrinal theology which he later published under the title Göttingen Dogmatics. Barth was, in effect, teaching himself theology by teaching others (and is not the first or last theologian to do so!).

What is far less well-known, however, is that alongside his work in historical and constructive Christian theology in Göttingen, Barth also lectured for an hour every week on the New Testament. So central to his identity did he consider his New Testament teaching to be that, in 1925, when Barth was appointed to a full chair at the University of Münster, he opted for the title of “Professor of Dogmatics and New Testament Exegesis”. A quick run through of the courses on New Testament texts Barth taught in this period reveals a staggering amount of work on a remarkably wide range of New Testament texts. In 1921–1922, Barth lectured on The Epistle to the Ephesians, accompanying his lecture with a weekly seminar. In the winter semester of 1922–1923, having worked for several years on the theology of Paul, Barth made the decision to lecture on the Epistle of James. In 1923–1924, he lectured on the first letter of John. Also in 1923, he returned to Paul, lecturing on 1 Corinthians with a particular focus on 1 Corinthians 15. In 1924, he taught the Epistle to the Philippians and, in the winter semester, the Epistle to the Colossians. In 1925, in his final semester at Göttingen, Barth gave his first lectures on the Matthean account of the Sermon on the Mount—his first academic attempt to study Jesus’ teaching.

After Barth’s move to Münster in 1925, his fame grew and with it pressures on his diary. While he gave his first New Testament lecture series on fresh material, the first eight chapters of John’s Gospel (Barth 1986),1 he also began to repeat earlier lecture series, some with little revision, others with significant changes. In 1926–1927, he taught Philippians and later in 1927 Colossians. Following his move to Bonn in 1930, Barth tacked slightly, teaching a seminar across two semesters on the commentaries of Luther and of Calvin on Galatians. In 1933, he repeated his lectures on John’s Gospel and a year later those on Colossians, before he was ejected from his post at Bonn on account of his prominent role in the Confessing Church in 1935. Only Barth’s lectures on 1 Corinthians were published contemporaneously, appearing in 1924 under the title The Resurrection of the Dead. Most of the other lectures have appeared in Barth’s posthumous Gesammelte Schriften; a few (the lectures on 1 John, Colossians and the Sermon on the Mount) have not yet been transcribed from the original handwritten manuscripts. A few have appeared in English: the lectures on Ephesians (Barth 2017) and Philippians (Barth 2002); the commentary on 1 Corinthians 15 (Barth 1933), and from the lectures on John 1–8 the part on John chapter 1 (Barth 1986).

Barth’s inexperience as a lecturer and as a New Testament scholar shows in several ways. He often failed to plan his lectures properly, writing his lectures week by week until he ran out of time long before covering what he had set out to cover. For example, lecturing on Ephesians, Barth gave 13 lectures, six before Christmas and seven after. In his final lecture before Christmas, he scribbled a marginal note saying “too slow”, presumably following a student comment on the fact that after almost half the course he had not made it beyond Ephesians 1:4 (see Francis Watson’s introduction in Barth 2017, p. 13). Similarly, setting out to lecture on the whole of John’s Gospel Barth spent so long on chapter 1 that he did not go beyond chapter 8. Barth’s Greek is decent but not faultless. Francis Watson, in his razor-sharp introductory essay to Barth’s lectures on Philippians, comments that even the new scholarly dimension that Barth introduced into his lecturing on NT texts “does not go very deep and the information and analysis that Barth offers is of variable quality”. Watson adds that even Barth’s translation from Greek to German is not entirely reliable (Barth 2002, p. xxxi).

Before excavating a few passages from the lectures themselves, it is useful to take note of the audience to whom they were addressed. For the twelve years he worked as a pastor and preacher, Barth had worked with biblical texts not only in the pulpit, but in Bible studies and confirmation classes. To a large extent, his Romans commentary too is addressed to a parish audience. But with his move to a university post, Barth recognised a need to adapt to his new context. In Göttingen, Münster, and Bonn, Barth’s audience was made up almost entirely of men preparing for ordained ministry. The lectures are frequently interspersed with comments that indicate he intends them to be preparation for the task of preaching as would later be true for his Church Dogmatics. Crucially, Barth’s audience in Göttingen had a working knowledge of Greek and Barth is able to comment on the Greek text of the New Testament. Moreover, he pays greater attention to a number of historical questions—such as the disputed authorship of Ephesians (he concludes, as had his father, that Paul is the author) and the vexed question of the date and location it was written (he suggests, without being certain, that it was written from Rome sometime after 60 AD).

Even in the first of his New Testament lectures, more than cosmetic changes in response to context begin to be evident in Barth’s approach. Francis Watson identifies the key change in method. In contrast to his Romans commentary, already in his Ephesians lectures Barth’s theological reflections are accompanied by a new emphasis on a close reading of the text of the letter:

The difference is signalled not only by the use of the Greek text but also by the fact that it is frequently cited within Barth’s comments on particular words and phrases. The movement is no longer away from the text but around it.

(Barth 2017, p. 20)

Barth’s New Testament lectures in Göttingen, and later, adds Watson in an essay on Barth’s lectures on Philippians, “are genuinely intended as exegesis of a scriptural text; the text is no mere pretext for something else” (Barth 2002, p. xxvii), as arguably it had been in his Romans. Barth has taken on board a basic assumption of the task of biblical exegesis, which is that before one may get on with theology, one first has to work out what the text says. Yet, for Watson, this does not altogether overcome a difficulty he has with Barth’s exegetical approach, which is that he continued throughout his career to construe historical questions and theological questions in distinction from each other, while for Watson establishing what Paul said is not fundamentally distinct from establishing what he is saying. For Barth, even respecting the question of who has the authority to determine the text of scripture, the church should have priority over the textual historian. An example occurs in Barth’s 1924 lectures on Christian Dogmatics in his discussion of Romans 5:1, wherein Paul discusses the peace with God associated with justification by faith. Barth acknowledges that the oldest and most reliable manuscripts employ the subjunctive exõmen (let us have), but, given the context of Paul’s theology, Barth prefers the indicative form exomen—“we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”. Barth’s judgment in this case is not particularly odd—the New Revised Standard Version makes the same decision for example. But a footnote added by Barth to the published version of the lectures draws a combative conclusion: “does a long or a short o in Romans 5 depend on some professor or on the church?” (Barth 1991, p. 236 footnote 12).

Barth’s decision in 1922 to give twelve lectures on the epistle of James was, perhaps, a surprising departure for a theologian who was known for being closely bound to Paul. Yet, his exegetical method remained similar. Again, Barth begins by extensive engagement with grammatical and textual questions, spending all of his first lecture and parts of subsequent lectures too dealing with issues of authorship, dating, etc. He is agnostic about the identity of the author, and tentative about date, suggesting the turn of the first and second centuries. With James too, however, what matters in the end is that writer is “God’s and the Lord Jesus Christ’s servant” (Card-Hyatt 2017, pp. 33–41). James, like Paul, Barth writes, has God as his central interest, but now with an emphasis upon God’s call to repentance. Barth leads his students through the question of the whether the letter was intended originally for Jewish readers, or for Jewish Christians, or for Christians generally, but concludes that an answer is hardly relevant since in any case James’s concern is to help his readers navigate from God’s action towards his creatures to the living of an obedient life. James is not writing a moral textbook, in other words, but seeking to show how “God’s freedom and sovereignty means their own freedom and meaningful action” (Card-Hyatt 2017, p. 38). In the final lecture of the series, Barth tackles potential tensions between Paul’s emphasis on salvation by faith and James’s emphasis good works. In answer, he declines attempts to unify two disparate perspectives. James, Barth suggests, is possibly seeking to correct misreadings of Paul more than correcting Paul himself. Nevertheless:

Whoever does not note that one can in no way read the New Testament as a whole as a sourcebook for proper dogmatic sentences, while it puts its own distinctive dogmatic sentences in question … whoever does not notice here, what clearly is to be noticed by the collection of the New Testament canon: that the NT as a whole does not deal in -isms, but with an object that lies beyond all, including all apostolic -isms, will have great difficulty noticing it at all.

(Cited and translated by Card-Hyatt 2017, p. 40; see also Barth 2009, pp. 488–90)

In other words, the unity of scripture lies not in the univocal views of all its authors but rather in the fact that each of them testifies to same Jesus Christ and to the same God.

In 1923, Barth lectured on another non-Pauline text: the first letter of John. In spite of the central emphasis in the epistle on love which Barth, like Augustine and others also attended to, when he returned to Paul’s theology in his lectures on 1 Corinthians, Barth identifies not love (1 Corinthians 13!) but resurrection as the central theme of the letter. This interpretive decision in favour of eschatology and hope struck Rudolf Bultmann in his extensive and otherwise sympathetic 1926 review of the published lectures as being counter-intuitive (Bultmann [1966] 1969). Of all Barth’s lectures on New Testament texts, the lectures on 1 Corinthians and on John’s Gospel prove, with hindsight, to be the most significant. In The Resurrection of the Dead, Barth interprets 1 Corinthians, and indeed Paul more generally, according to his theology of resurrection. In a foreword to the published lectures, we find Barth still dwelling on his relationship to New Testament scholars (Barth 1933). There really is no need, Barth hopes, for a renewal for the criticism made in relation to his Romans commentary: simply put, his approach to the texts is simply different from that of the historian. He is deaf to prohibitions of the kind of self-reflective exegesis he proposes to undertake. Nevertheless, Barth leaves open the possibility that even his interpretation might illuminate aspects of history that should not be neglected.

In the main body of the text, Barth acknowledges that chapters 13 and 15 of 1 Corinthians both stand out from the remainder of the letter. But in contrast with several contemporary commentators, Barth maintained that the epistle has both textual and thematic integrity. And the integrity of 1 Corinthians lies in the unifying function of Paul’s account of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the event which is the foundation of Christian hope. (Bultmann, by contrast, would advance the same argument, but make love the central theme). In the 1950s, in volume 4 of his Church Dogmatics on the doctrine of Reconciliation, Barth would advance, of course with greater sophistication across several part volumes, what is essentially the central claim made in short book on 1 Corinthians 15. This is a perfect example of the significance for Barth’s theological formation of Barth’s lectures on New Testament texts. The Resurrection of the Dead begins with a whirlwind tour of chapters 1 Corinthians 1–14. Once this has been completed, the first section of Barth’s exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15 is headed “The Resurrection Gospel as the Foundation of the Church”. When, Barth explains, Paul tells the Corinthians in verse 3 that he has delivered to them that which he received, he is clearly indicating that what he tells them of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is not his idea; neither is he trying to provide evidence to persuade them of the truth of what he is saying. Paul, Barth thinks, means to say that

the gospel of the primitive Church has no other meaning than my gospel. It will profit you nothing to try to get behind Paul in order to procure a gospel that is alleged to be simpler and more acceptable, for if you go behind Paul you will stumble at the first step upon the same riddle that you think only Paul and Paulinism confronts you with now.

(Barth 1933, pp. 122–23)

It is worth registering that Barth is commenting here not only on a viewpoint held by some first century Corinthian followers of Jesus, but on a widely held viewpoint in his own context. In 1900, Adolf von Harnack’s published lectures on Das Wesen des Christentums (Harnack 1900) sold widely not only in German, but in English translation as What is Christianity? (Harnack 1901). In them, Harnack had famously suggested that the task of the historical theologian was to strip away the husk of tradition to expose the true kernel of the Gospel. And in small part Harnack understood that to mean stripping Paul away to get to Jesus. Paul, Harnack had argued, replaced the teaching of Jesus and replaced it with a mystical teaching about Jesus: “The formation of a correct theory of and about Christ threatens to assume [i.e., in Paul] the position of chief importance, and to pervert the majesty and simplicity of the Gospel” (Harnack 1901, pp. 186–87).

For Barth, yes, the crucifixion was indeed an event in history. So too is the resurrection: but the resurrection takes place at “the frontier of history”:

Like two massive pillars: Christ died for our sins; and: Christ rose again on the third day; both being asserted “according to the scriptures”, as historical facts, to be sure, but, pray, what kind of historical facts? This end, and this beginning, the beginning of new life, which yet can only begin when and where a new world begins.

(Barth 1933, p. 124)

Key here, as Carsten Card-Hyatt notes, is that Barth’s earlier insistence on faith being the “objective” object of theology is here replaced with the faith of the Church: “there is a community that precedes and encloses individual faith” (Card-Hyatt 2017, p. 78). Yet, even the witness of that community existing at a particular historical moment has divine sovereignty as the condition of its witness. Christ’s resurrection is not merely an important event: it “provides the very form of Christian teaching” (Card-Hyatt 2017, p. 80). Moreover, it is a form that is finally eschatological: Christ’s resurrection really is, for Barth, an event in history; but as the condition and promise of the resurrection of the dead at the last judgment it is freighted with eschatological promise. The true reality of the resurrection is, in effect, the possibility of thinking the promise it makes.

The importance of Barth’s exegetical lectures on 1 Corinthians for Barth’s later theology is spelled out by Robert Dale Dawson who argues persuasively that the central insight Barth draws from his lectures—that 1 Corinthians 15 is “the secret nerve and interpretive key of the whole of Paul’s theology”… “It ought not to surprise us then [continues Dawson] that the doctrine of the resurrection should occupy a similar place of importance in Barth’s own though” (Dawson 2007, p. 2). As Barth puts it in in a small print section of Church Dogmatics III/2:

For the New Testament this later history [i.e., of the resurrection event] is not just an appendix or an afterthought to the main theme, It is not peripheral to the New Testament, but central; not inessential or dispensable, but essential and indispensable. And it is all this, not in a different sense, but exactly in the sense in which the New Testament takes it … Everything else in the New Testament contains and presupposes the resurrection. It is the key to the whole

(Barth 1960, p. 443)

In this section, Barth has Bultmann’s approach to a demythologizing biblical exegesis in his cross hairs, but these remarks would equally apply to Adolf von Harnack’s commitment to stripping away the “husk” of Pauline theology from the “kernel” of Jesus’s moral teaching. Dawson’s monograph goes on to offer chapter length treatments of the role played by a Pauline theology of Jesus’s resurrection in Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59.3, in which resurrection becomes “the verdict of the Father” on the Son; Church Dogmatics IV/2, §64.4, in which the direction given to the life of reconciled human beings is indicated by the risen Son, and Church Dogmatics IV/3, §69.4 in which the Easter event is characterised as Jesus’s self-declaration, the unique, once-for-all, irrevocable self-giving of God to humankind.

During the summer semester of 1924, Barth lectured on Philippians. In Romans, Barth had hoped to read with and beyond Paul. This had proved a powerful rhetorical strategy that enabled Barth to articulate a challenge to prevailing historical–critical exegetical practices. But, as Francis Watson points out, Barth’s critique in Romans had shortcomings. A “major limitation”, writes Watson:

lies in the apparent disjunction between what Paul said and what Paul says. Paul said one thing to his contemporaries; he says another thing, “far more important”, to all people, and specifically to ourselves… What is overlooked is the possibility that what Paul says now is identical to what Paul said then, so that the task of theological exegesis is the attempt to disclose this identity—rather than to reinforce the assumption that the scholarly study of what Paul once said to his contemporaries is of limited significance for theology.

(Barth 2002, pp. xxix–xxx)

However, by 1926/7, when he lectured on Philippians, Barth’s earlier view that a gaping ditch lies between what Paul said and what Paul is saying, or one might say between exegesis and doctrine, has been reconsidered. As Watson puts it: “the disjunction between then and now has been largely abandoned” (Barth 2002, p. xxx).

Similar concerns about how the biblical text speaks now are in play in Barth’s lectures on the Sermon on the Mount, which Barth gave in his final semester in Göttingen. In several ways, his reading of the Sermon on the Mount follows along similar lines to readings of the same gospel passage by earlier Reformed theologians. Barth reads the beatitudes, for example, as a critical attack on the possibility of human ethics. His extended discussion of the relation between Mosaic law and Jesus’s teaching is resolved by his retrieval of a theology of the covenant. By viewing Jesus as the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets, Barth tried to move away from narrow and ultimately fruitless discussions of whether or not Jesus’s disciples remain bound by them. Yet, this too may be a risky strategy: on the one hand, Barth asserts that since the “New” is contained in the “Old”, Old and New are given equality. But in emphasising the eschatological fulfilment of the Old in the New Barth at the same time may be perceived fatally to undermine that equality. To be sure, this is a standard move in Protestant theology, but in the context of the mid twentieth century, its potential for giving succour to antisemitism is nonetheless troubling.

Alongside his final Göttingen lectures on the New Testament, Barth lectured on “Christian theology in draft form”, which were subsequently published as his Göttingen Dogmatics. Here, Barth took the opportunity to engage in hermeneutical reflection on his developing practices of biblical exegesis. In the version of the lectures first published in 1927, Barth begins by taking stock of the historical reality of revelation by noting “… the unavoidable insight that the Bible cannot come to be God’s Word if it is not this already” (Barth 1991, p. 219). For Barth, neither the historical critic nor the church, in spite of its role in deciding which texts constitute the regulative canon for its life, can make God speak in the Bible if God has not already spoken in them and continues freely to speak through them. Who then is the biblical interpreter and how should they go about responsible exegesis leading to faithful theology? Alongside the authority of the witness of scripture, Barth sets out what he terms the “Various Freedoms [i.e., of the faithful interpreter] in Relation to Scripture”. Being a reader, he tells us “implies my own determining of the data. It is a negation of dependence, mediacy, and bondage. It entails a possibility of beginning directly at the beginning”. Barth then begins to set out his account of his own exegetical practice in a passage worth citing at some length:

The witness of the prophets and apostles is a collection of records of concrete historical situations. As I study these, I unavoidably try to reconstruct these situations. On the basis of what is in the text I try to establish how things were then, what the authors had in mind when they said this or that, and apart from the authors and the texts how the events took place which they record. I combine these findings with other things that the same authors might have said about the same subjects or others. When the text is silent, I try to supplement its thoughts with cautious conjectures so as to form them into a whole. I try to understand them on the basis of what earlier or contemporary authors say on whom they might be dependent or with whom they might share a common legacy. I will especially use this procedure in relation to historical reports, and with the aid of further sources I will try to construct a picture of the events that the authors record. As I have either earlier or at the same time, by a similar procedure, formed some picture of the whole period, its events, relationships, and movements, its external and internal makeup, I fit the pictures that I have taken from the texts into this larger picture, and when I adduce similarly achieved pictures of the times that precede and follow, set these pictures in the framework of historical development, and look at them in this way, then I have carried through what might be called the act of historical investigation (Barth 1991, p. 256).

Naturally, different readers will do this kind of work with differing levels of skill. “There is”, Barth acknowledges, “a wide gap between the refined research of a Harnack or a Holl and the simple investigation of an old peasant sitting down with a Luther Bible. But the degree of skill and the wealth of aids do not decide whether the historical investigation that takes place is true and useful or not [my italics]”. (Barth 1991) There are then two sides to what Barth tells his students about historical inquiry. On the one hand, historical inquiry is necessary; on the other hand, in the end attending to the truth of a biblical text will not depend on historical knowledge. Barth invites the possibility that the individual he colourfully calls a “simple peasant” may, in the event, have a truer grasp of the meaning of Paul or Matthew or John than Professor Adolf von Harnack.

4. Conclusions

In a few short years, beginning in 1921, Karl Barth reconsidered and revised the practice of biblical exegesis that had won him his first teaching post. In part this may be explained as a function of his move from a parish pulpit to a university lectern; but the questions raised, among others by his former teacher Adolf von Harnack, helped Barth to sharpen up both his theological understanding of biblical exegesis but also his exegetical practice. Barth was no shrinking violet: he could fight his corner with what appeared to many to be stubborn obduracy. Yet, Barth was no fool: when a strong point or a good question was put to him, he could—sometimes—learn and change.

Along with many other Protestant theologians, Barth consistently maintained that the self-revelation of God is given in Jesus Christ; Scripture is the primary norm and witness to Jesus Christ; and preaching is its contemporary proclamation. Doctrinal theology is never more or less than human words spoken that seek to bear faithful witness to God’s Word, for which reason theologians in each succeeding generation must take responsibility for their own thinking and speaking. In the first part volume of Barth’s Church Dogmatics he famously counselled theologians to practice humility. For:

God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog. We do well to listen to Him if He really does. But, unless we regard ourselves as the prophets and founders of a new Church, we cannot say that we are commissioned to pass on what we have heard as independent proclamation.

(CD 1/1, p. 182)

For Barth, the Bible is the Church’s book: it is these Scriptures and none other that, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, God has caused “to be written for our learning” in order that Christians (including Christian theologians) may by grace “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them”. The doctrine of the church comes about only in answer to questions that the Bible sets before it. Barth’s exegetical lectures demonstrably shaped his developing doctrinal proposals. But exegesis, as Barth fully understood, is a human task and is not infallible. Francis B. Watson’s sympathetic but critically acute treatment of Barth’s lectures on Ephesians and Philippians leads him to think that Barth never quite resolves the tension between history and eschatology, or explains satisfactorily how what God says through biblical texts today is both bound to and free from what the biblical authors once wrote. Many years later, in a conversation with theology students in Paris, Barth reported with relish a comment made by some readers of his Church Dogmatics that:

Really, your exegesis, the small print, was more convincing than the large print [with the doctrinal argument]’. And that [continued Barth] demonstrates that my exegesis was not simply to confirm my dogmatics, but that I allowed Scripture, as I honestly understand it, to take the lead and to have the initiative for my ‘large print’.

(Barth 2018, pp. 137–38)

There are several strategies for reading Barth’s Church Dogmatics, but far from the worst of these may well be to pay greatest attention to the biblical exegesis in the small print.