An Explorer's Guide to Karl Barth by David Guretzki

Author:David Guretzki [Guretzki, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2016-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (1931)59

Background. In October 1929, Barth found himself once again in transition, this time with a move to the theological faculty at Bonn, Germany. He remained at Bonn until the tumultuous mid-1930s during the alarming rise of Hitler’s National Socialist movement. It had been during his tenure at Münster that Barth attempted, a second time, to write a dogmatics, which he titled Christian Dogmatics in Outline (Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf).60 However, shortly after his arrival at Bonn, Barth abandoned the project and, as he characteristically put it, “began again at the beginning” when he finally started his CD in the early 1930s.

It was during this time that Barth completed this densely written piece that he affectionately called his “little work on Anselm of Canterbury.”61 The book paid particular attention to the so-called proof for the existence of God as outlined in Anselm’s book, Proslogion. Barth had lectured on Anselm’s Cur Deus homo? in the summer of 1926 at Münster, but he returned again to Anselm in the summer of 1930.62

Scholars tracing Barth’s theological development over the course of his career have tended to see the book on Anselm as marking a shift in his thought forms. This conclusion is supported both by Hans Urs von Balthasar’s magisterial study of Barth’s development63 and Barth’s own affirmation of the importance of the Anselm book as “if not the key, then certainly a very important key to understanding the movement of thought which has urged itself upon me more and more in the Church Dogmatics.”64 More recently, however, scholars have started to view the Anselm book less as a shift in thought forms or concepts for Barth and more as a clearer and more consistent outworking of concepts and methods that had already been at work as far back as Romans or The Göttingen Dogmatics.65 Our intention here is not to adjudicate this interpretive question of the significance of Barth’s Anselm book as much as to highlight how the book itself seeks to correct what Barth saw as a wide Christian misreading of Anselm and his purposes. In other words, I encourage readers to engage Barth’s commentary on Anselm especially to think through Barth’s understanding of the significance and purpose (or function) of Anselm’s so-called proofs of God’s existence. In other words, read the book to better understand Anselm rather than Barth!

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