Two Passing Topics in My Study of Barth:
Science and (Auto-)Biograph

I am hotly studying Karl Barth, in a hot season. For this entry, I shall none-warmly, factually, touch on two passing topics of this study.

I. The First Topic.

"Dogmatics is a science." So begins the very first sentence of Barth's Englished Dogmatics in Outline (1959, 1949). By 'science,' he says he means, "...an attempt at comprehension and exposition, at investigation and instruction, which is related to a definite object and sphere of activity." (ibid.)

I think I may have some understanding of this defintion, and this explanation of dogmatics. But it would be hard to see by this standard how astrology, enteromancy (fortune-telling from animal entrails), and the earnest side of "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll have a certain comprehension and exposition and thus are science. By a very gracious and to some understudied mathematics-- the discipline of being-consistent-- is also a science; for the purposes of the principle of charity logically and ethically I shall assume that Barth means this sense, that theology is the tautological comprehension and exposition of Christian consistencies (that also happens to be the way I mean theology.)

But the tautologies from which Barth work themselves have inconsistencies, and the tautologies he posits themselves have inconsistencies that reach out just a thought beneath the surface of reading. The Creed Barth expounds upon is the dubiously titled 'Apostle's Symbol,' of Latin construction several centuries status post the Apostles-- and 76 words in Latin picked from thousands perhaps of letters from the 144+ confessions of Christendom; Barth both knows this and writes as much in his Preface here (ibid.) His Ultimate Tautology is the Bible: this Bible I know says to indulge a fool in his folly, and immediately not to indulge a fool in his folly (Proverbs 26:4-5) and other statements which may be satisfied in poetry, but harder in tautology.

This almost becomes tautologizing which can go-anywhere, do-anything; by a doxastic logic such paradoxicality can be neither believed nor disbelieved. Thus by reductio ad absurdum Barth's prime thesis-- the absolute for belief of dogma-- is paradoxed.

II. The Second Topic.

I now have in hand a book which almost goes-the-distance toward fathoming the first theologizing of Barth: Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts by Eberhard Busch (1976, 1975). The English text seems thoughtfully translated by a John Bowden, fitly said to be a Barth scholar.

I have read only the preface to this work. Some of my hindrance concerning the Christian walk of Barth ( A = B in the Fregean sense) have been well-attenuated by Bowden's depiction of Barth as anti-Nazi, pro-trade-union, initially a 'red pastor' for these causes.

The report in this Preface satisfies a notion that Busch's text-- even in English-- will suffice at the level of prolegomenon for study. Deutsch as close to the holographic (handwritten) level of the letters/autobiographs of Barth will be the requisite for sure analysis. Verstehenhermeneutik can only recapitulate at some vastly greater date.

This is only the method of hermeneutics permissible under Schleiermacherian 'house rules' (Greek: oikonomia -- rather "economics"). Barth does not seem to permit this, nor do Barthians for study of Barth-- only to some extent for other matters.

--Vernon Lynn Stephens, Culdee
Time of Compline
Day of Ste. Monica (Western Church)
Day of St. Poimen, Ascetic (Orthodoxy)