Karl Barth and Post-Reformation Orthodoxy

Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317109563
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Christianity

Throughout his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth converses with the great theologians of post-reformation orthodoxy, quoting from works in his private collection. When Barth became Honorary Professor of Reformed Theology at the University of Göttingen in 1921, his knowledge of the Reformed tradition was practically non-existent; he quickly amassed his collection of ancient copies in order to acquire a thorough knowledge of orthodoxy. In Karl Barth and Post-Reformation Orthodoxy, Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer identifies and discusses the sources of Barth's conversations and analyses Barth's use and (mis)understandings of them. Each chapter focuses on one of the topics in Christian Dogmatics, with the last chapter exploring the way in which Barth's role as a reader of the 19th-century writer of a textbook on Reformed Dogmatics Heinrich Heppe influenced the ultimate shaping of Church Dogmatics. Reeling Brouwer offers a major contribution to Barth scholarship and an important resource for theologians as well as historians focusing on the post-reformation protestant theology.

Chapter 1
Karl Barth’s Conversation with Amandus Polanus

Especially with Regard to the Dichotomies in his Speaking of God

Introduction

When Karl Barth, after the discharge from his professorship in Bonn and the apparent lack of prospects regarding other theological appointments in Germany, accepted the hastily created function as professor at the university of his native town of Basel in June of 1935, he decided in the first years of his teaching and research there to give special attention to several post-Reformation theologians who had preceded him in this city. Thus the (delayed) inaugural address which he held on 6 May 1936 was on Samuel Werenfels,¹ the local representative of the so-called ‘reasonable orthodoxy’ of the early eighteenth century.² And in three semesters in 1937 and 1938³ he and the students in his ‘society’ focussed on the two-part Compendium theologiae Christianae of Johannes Wollebius (1626) which had recently been re-edited by Ernst Bizer.⁴ Yet it seems that the most important outcome of Barth’s turn to Basel theology was his ongoing conversation with his distant but also – in his own words – ‘illustrious’ predecessor⁵ as professor in Basel, Amandus Polanus a Polansdorf (1561–1610), whose Syntagma theologiae Christianae appears in nearly every one of the volumes of Barth’s Church Dogmatics that stems from his Basel years.⁶

Barth had become acquainted with Polanus when he was professor of Reformed theology in Göttingen, as he began to orient himself in his preparations for his first lectures in dogmatics using Heppe’s textbook on Reformed orthodoxy. The statistics are as follows: the Göttingen Dogmatics includes a total of 56 references to Polanus, where Barth himself mentions the author’s name 36 times (in the other cases he refers to Heppe in a general sense and the editor then identifies the reference as a quotation from Polanus). In U.P. these numbers are 3 and 1, respectively (expanded to 8 and 3, respectively, in the Münster Christliche Dogmatik of 1927); in U.I., 26 and 19, respectively; and in U.II., 36 and 16, respectively. Barth was developing a certain familiarity with this theologian from old Protestantism here, as is obvious from phrases like: ‘and finally our dialectical friend Polanus, in good Reformed manner, added: … ’ or: ‘we are here following the sharp-witted Polanus … ’.⁷ Bruce McCormack has even argued that it was Barth’s encounter with the particular form of typically Reformed anhypostatic Christology found in Polanus (as reported in Heppe) which provided him with the necessary intellectual tools for a shift in the structure of his theological thinking in general, as evident, for example, in such important issues as the relationship between dialectics and history, or the analogia fidei.⁸

Amandus Polanus⁹ was born in the Silesian town of Troppau and attended the St. Elisabeth-Gymnasium in Breslau where Melanchthon’s didactic methods were followed and where Zacharias Ursinus had taught from 1558–1560. Polanus then studied in Tübingen, Basel, and finally in Geneva, where he followed the lectures of Theodore Beza, who considered him to be the most promising member of the next generation of Reformed theologians. For many years he served as an ephorus (tutor) to the sons of several noble families from Moravia, mainly the Von Zierotin house, on their educational trips (peregrinatio academica) across Europe. At the end of his life he dedicated his Syntagma to the head of this family, Karl von Zierotin. In 1596 he was appointed professor of Old Testament – the primary field of many classical Reformed theologians, as I think it should be today as well – at the university of Basel. This office also involved certain duties which he was to accomplish on behalf of the city church. Aside from a series of commentaries, he also wrote books on logic, including a Syntagma logicum Aristotelico-Ramaeum (1605) and conducted and published many disputationes. His Partitiones Theologicae, a presentation of Christian doctrine and Christian ethics in the form of a series of theses, was published as early as 1589. In fact, the Syntagma Theologiae Christianae, which appeared just before his untimely death due to a plague epidemic that swept through Basel in 1610, should be regarded as a voluminous extension of this earlier work.¹⁰ One of its main characteristics is the greater amount of room it devotes to polemics. Many disputationes, mainly directed against the newer Roman-Catholic theological schools (Robert Bellarmine), were inserted into the framework of the dogmatic exposition in this work. It is worthwhile noting that, apart from these disputations, the doctrinal discourse of this work is not the fruit of Polanus’s ordinary lectures. This was not the case with John Calvin’s Institutes, either. Older Reformed theologians are always primarily Biblical scholars!

As the title of his revised Logic indicates, Polanus like most members of his generation did not consider ‘Ramism’ and ‘Aristotelianism’ to be contradictory forms. The new logic of Peter Ramus was seen as useful for stressing the practical tenor of holy doctrine and above all to provide the teacher with a didactic scheme by which to arrange his instructional material. On the other hand, the Aristotelian tradition with its syllogistic strength – and its dissemination among medieval scholastics, concerning whom Polanus was very well informed – made it possible to be victorious in all confessional disputes. The combination was, so to speak, the ideal of scientific research in that age; the subtitle of the Syntagma, ‘iuxta leges ordinis Methodici conformatum’, suggests that if you ‘follow this way of clarity, transparency, and logical consistency, you will win all debates with your Roman-Catholic or Lutheran opponents’. ‘Ramism’ or ‘Aristotelianism’ do not appear here to represent a position that in any way touches the content of the doctrine.¹¹

So far the only available major study on the theology of Polanus (but unfortunately not at the level of Staehelin) is that of Heiner Faulenbach.¹² Although he analyses the structure of Polanus’s theology and has a chapter on its logic, his presentation in fact completely disregards the Ramist shape Polanus gave to his Syntagma. As such, Faulenbach’s presentation of the doctrinal material is dissociated from Polanus’s table of contents. One wonders whether an author is really taken seriously, if treated in this way.

Richard A. Muller, on the other hand, takes the Ramist framework of Polanus very seriously in his voluminous Post-Reformational Reformed Dogmatics. He frequently quotes the Synopsis totius Syntagmatis, which Polanus opens with an overview of the entire work.¹³ This attention to the formal structure of the work undoubtedly shows progress in the research of Reformed orthodoxy. Yet Muller, with his vehement protest against any ‘accommodation’ of earlier theologies to the needs and questions of later generations, unfortunately not only is in danger of eliminating the article of faith on the communio sanctorum, but also seems to walk away from the theological duty of ‘historical theology’ to challenge ‘systematic theology’ in its constructive task.¹⁴

The starting point for this chapter will be the Ramist schemes structuring Polanus’s Syntagma. Although Barth pays no attention to them, it is apparent that many of his debates with Polanus are related to his interpretation of the Ramist bifurcations as expressions of a supposed theological dualism. This approach will also give us an overview of the main topics on which Polanus is quoted in the Church Dogmatics. After that, we will look specifically at the Synopsis of the second Book of the Syntagma, ‘On the Essence and Attributes of God’, and investigate the way Barth quotes this book in CD II/1, where the density of Polanus-quotations is the highest. When we then, in a third step, focus on CD II/1 § 29 (the debate on human speaking of the names and perfections of God), it will emerge that the main theological point of contention between Barth and Polanus may not so much concern a duality as the simplicity (and then also the multiplicity) of God. In a next section, this hypothesis will be tested by way of a discussion of one of the more important excursuses on Polanus in the CD. After thus concluding the main part of this chapter, we will return to Barth’s treatment of Polanus in an epilogue. This epilogue will raise the methodological issue of the extent to which it makes sense to allow the voice of a theologian from the past to be heard in the structure of one’s own theology, if the quotations of that other theologian are inevitably going to appear in a completely new context. In other words, one might ask what the yield is of this kind of intertextuality that takes place between the Church Dogmatics and the Syntagma.¹⁵

An Endless Series of Dichotomies

Ramist formal logic limited itself to defining and dividing.¹⁶ General definitions were followed by ever expanding dichotomies into their refined particularities. The advantage of this logic was its attractiveness from a didactic perspective; it simplified things and was easy to visualise. Many manuals of philology, philosophy, physics, but also theology were provided with fold-out schemes full of bifurcations which could be identified by brackets – instead of the tables of the ‘Synopsis totius Syntagmatis’ one finds, for example, at the beginning of the gigantic Syntagma.¹⁷ This feature expressed an intensely felt Renaissance need for method (in a pre-Cartesian sense), as well as an intense awareness of the need for ordering life (which made this method especially – but not exclusively – attractive to the Reformed tradition). The Ramist method was undoubtedly deductive in character, but this deductivism only had a methodological status, and not an ontological one. My sense is that when Barth read these Ramist schemes in Polanus, he always feared that these formal structures would in the end have repercussions for theological content.

Polanus displays some features of the so-called ‘analytical’ method, which in any ...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Karl Barth’s Conversation with Amandus Polanus Especially with Regard to the Dichotomies in his Speaking of God
• 2 Karl Barth’s Elaboration of a Series of Disputations from the Leiden Synopsis: Scripture, Trinity, Providence, Predestination, and Incarnation
• 3 Johannes Cocceius and Karl Barth On the Covenant and the Decree of Salvation
• 4 Karl Barth Reading the Reformed Doctrine of the Church in Heppe
• 5 Karl Barth and the Janus Face of the Doctrine of Justification in ‘Reasonable Orthodoxy’
• 6 Some Consequences of Barth’s Encounter with Heppe for the Order of the Church Dogmatics
• Bibliography
• Index