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Why Study Historical Theology?
By what critical standard is tradition to be measured? By tradition is to be understood, let us say, the sum total of the voices of the Fathers. In no circumstances obviously can this choir of the voices of the early Church be regarded as a second source of revelation. . . . No! must be said to that. . . . The Reformation Scripture-principle placed the Church permanently under the authority of the prophetic-apostolic Bible-Word; and it did that in the opinion that, in this human distinction between the Church and Holy Scripture as teacher of the Church, there is expressed the abiding, lasting difference between the Lord of the Church and the Church as the assembly of believers upon earth. This barrier between Scripture and Church . . . points like a sign to the barrier between the Church and its Lord. . . . Tradition is not revelation.--But there is this to be said--and it is in consonance with the Fathers of the Early Church and of the Reformation--that in the Church there can never be any question of overleaping the centuries and immediately (each trusting to the sharpness of his eye and the openness of his heart) linking up with the Bible. That is the Biblicism that significantly appeared again and again in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the idea that it is possible to dismiss with a lofty gesture Nicaenum, Orthodoxy, Scholasticism, Church Fathers, Confessions and cling "to the Bible alone"! . . . The proceeding that seems to maintain so logically the Scripture-principle, always-strange to say-meant the emergence of a richly modern theology! For these determined "Biblicists" had their contemporary philosophy in their heads, took it with them to the Bible and so most certainly read themselves into the Bible, no less than Church Fathers and Scholastics. They were no doubt free of Church dogma but not of their own dogmas and conceptions. Luther and Calvin did not go to work on the Bible in this way. Neither should we. It is in the Church that the Bible is read; it is by the Church that the Bible is heard. That means that in reading the Bible we should also hear what the Church, the Church that is distinguished from my person, has up to now read and heard from the Bible. Are we at liberty to ignore all that? Do the great teachers of the Church, to the Councils not possess a-certainly not heavenly-but, eve so, earthly, human "authority"? We should not be too ready to say, No. To my mind the whole question of tradition falls under the Fifth Commandment: Honor father and mother! Certainly that is a limited authority; we have to obey God more than father and mother. And so I should call to all those who get excited when they hear the words Orthodoxy, Council, Catechism: Dear friends, no excitement! There is no question of bondage and constraint. It is merely that in the Church the same kind of obedience as, I hope, you pay to your father and mother, is demanded of you towards the Church's past, towards the "elders" of the church. That is quite simply an ordinance. . . . In this obedience to the Church's past it is always possible to be a very free theologian. But it must be borne in mind that, as a member of the Church, as belonging to the congregation of the faithful, one must not speak without having heard. The Reformers knew that. You are aware that, in the Confessions, they refer to the Councils of the early Church, and there can be no question that, with regard also to the content of their teaching, they appealed to the verdicts made by the Church in past times. Would it be possible to understand the doctrine of justification without the Trinitarian and Christological dogma?
Karl Barth, Credo: A Presentation of the Chief Problems of Dogmatics with Reference to the Apostles' Creed, Sixteen Lectures Delivered at the University of Utrecht in February and March, 1935, Translated by J. Strathearn McNab (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936) pp. 179-182.
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Grace and Peace,