Why do theologians ask what theology is? To the outside observer it all might sound a bit superfluous since, after all, anyone who has bothered to open up such an antiquated thing as a theology textbook would not need help with this. However this may seem to be the case, even a concise definition of theology conceals much of the nature that is being suggested of it, and the consensus on such definitions has by no means been unanimous. As a matter of fact, in their definition work theologians are mapping out its proper method, as well as answering objections to doing theology in the first place. Such objections come from within the church far more than from without.

The nineteenth century Princeton theologian Charles Hodge answered the lament that is still with us: “Why not just stick to the Bible?” He offered four replies which I will summarize in shorthand here:

(1) the opposite cannot be done given “the constitution of the human mind”; (2) a higher knowledge is gained than if we simply left in the Bible pages “a mere collection of isolated facts”; (3) a moral obligation arises to systematize given the “sum” and “whole counsel” of God’s truth (cf. Ps. 119:160; Acts 20:28); and (4) such is the will of God (Systematic Theology, I.2-3).

With a very different system of theology from Hodge, the twentieth century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, conceived of “dogmatic theology” as the articulation of the content of faith, “on the narrow way which leads from the enacted revelation to the promised revelation” (Church Dogmatics, I.1.2). It is an exercise in reflection for the church, as God gave his Word principally to the church; and it is everywhere for us supernatural rather than natural.

Hodge and Barth provide us with a very useful contrast in the study of theological prolegomena. Together they represent two very different responses to the weight of modern thought on the ancient truth. From an academic perspective, it is an oversimplification to place Hodge at the conservative end of the spectrum and Barth at the liberal end. Indeed Hodge is an appropriate representative of confessional Reformed theology in the modern setting. We ought to note, however, that Barth was attempting to correct the liberal theology and higher criticism of the preceding century. Liberals eyed him with suspicion, as a Fundamentalist in scholarly garb. The point of relevance is this: Hodge and Barth are more realistic “poles” of where Reformed seminarians may be entering pastoral ministry, or where the next Reformed theologians will be. Few today will emerge from conservative Reformed seminaries as devotees of the liberalism of Friedrich Schleiermacher, much less of Paul Tillich. A resurgent appropriation of the Barthian approach, on the other hand, fills the Reformed academic writings of our day. 

There are also well known criticisms of the methods of both. Critiques of Hodge have focused on both his objectivism with respect to truth, and his inductivism in the organization of that truth.1 Critiques of Barth have included his subjectivist, or dialectical, method and even Gnosticism in terms of his marginalization of nature.2 We will pay careful attention to each of these criticisms. 

What this paper aims to show, by way of contrasting the two overall visions of theology, is that Hodge’s objectivism is much to be preferred over Barth’s subjectivism. This is true even while we may push back against some excess in Hodge’s language about induction, and even while we may appreciate Barth’s attempt at reclaiming supernatural dogmatics from the prideful clutches of the skeptical academy. In pursuit of that thesis we will move from how the two men handled (1) the standard prolegomena question of definition, to (2) their presuppositions on supernatural and natural revelation, to (3) how Hodge and Barth both stood in the wider stream of modern thought, to finally (4) the implications for the best method of theology.

Hodge and Barth on the Standard Prolegomena Questions

Since the question “What is theology?” is most obviously a search for a definition, let us begin our comparison there. That theology is a science means that it is a treatment of knowledge (scientia) that is objective and systematic. Such was the case for Thomas Aquinas, Francis Turretin, and Herman Bavinck, just to name some of the more famous examples. We are not surprised to find the same in Hodge. And yet there is instantly in Hodge an insistence that objective science implies an activity of facts being arranged into a system. The conception of “science” in Hodge comes more into its modern mold: “If, therefore, theology be a science, it must include something more than mere knowledge of facts. It must embrace an exhibition of the internal relation of those facts, one to another, and each to all. It must be able to show that if one be admitted, others cannot be denied” (ST, I.1). There is not only this enterprise but, many have noted, something of a finished product implied:

“Theology, therefore, is the exhibition of the facts of Scripture in their proper order and relation, with the principles or general truths involved in the facts themselves and which pervade and harmonize the whole” (ST, I.19).

In Hodge’s defense, this “wholeness” does not deny the provisional and ongoing qualities of this enterprise. The finite theologian and his system have never “arrived” in this age. He is only speaking of a matter of operational order. 

True to his often obscure form, Barth is not so straightforward in a definition. He speaks of theology as an activity of (1) individuals in faith and life; (2) a church in service to God; and only then (3) a science (CD, I.1.1, 2). He has no trouble calling theology an objective science, so long as the principles of other sciences did not impose themselves on this alien subject matter. There is a hint that his criticism is aimed more at the separation of theology from the Church, rather than completely from other sciences (CD, I.1.1, 5). His motives here may be complex, to be fair, but I will argue that Barth stands very much in the Kantian stream of making faith safe from reason, and that this motive must be discerned underneath even our most charitable observations of other motives. 

Barth becomes clearer when the question turns to the axioms, methods, and ends of other sciences. Those must not undermine the axioms, methods, and ends of theological inquiry. It is “submission to standards” of other sciences, or to “a general concept of science” that are the problem. Although Barth used the word “objective,” yet to obtain scientific status, such as the world seeks, implied a “reality accessible to us,” which will run afoul in the Barthian vision (CD, I.1.6, 8).

We can already see that the definition of theology instantly lends itself to a discussion of its nature. That theology is “dogmatic” is different from mere systematics. Barth wrote, “As a theological discipline dogmatics is the scientific self-examination of the Christian Church with respect to the content of its distinctive talk about God” (CD, I.1.1). Dogmatics is what the church is bound to confess and reflect upon. But in what sense do we know God? The manner and extent to which we know God becomes the chief difference in method between Hodge and Barth. One approach we might call strictly theological while the other is Christological. The former has the greater pedigree in the history of theology. It is overtly metaphysical, emphasizing the order of being. In other words, the nature of God is more foundational to a system of Christian truth than the nature of Christ, since God’s nature is necessary in an absolute sense, whereas the reality of Christ as the Incarnate Son and within the economy of God’s works, is not necessary to God’s being. The latter approach does not necessarily deny this order of being, but stresses that we can only know God rightly as he is revealed in Jesus Christ. It is at this point that Barth exalts the “Word of God,” as in the second Person of the Trinity, and specifically in the economy of God’s grace, as the central lens outside of which all becomes distorted.

Yet Barth’s seemingly profound and pious center begs some questions. For instance: “Who is the God who is revealed in Christ?” Granting that Christ clarifies the God who is (Jn. 1:18; 14:9; Heb. 1:1-3), nonetheless the predicate term in “Jesus is God” has no fixed or objective meaning unless some predicates to “God is x,” are already known to be necessarily the case.

Such predicates, however, are at least partly made intelligible through the natural order (cf. Ps. 19:1-3; Rom. 1:19-20). This order of being, as being determinative for how we know, Barth will take to be anathema. Barth also took any Christology of the Word in abstracto, that is a metaphysical account of the eternal Son apart from the gospel, as mere speculation, forcing a “twofold Christ.”3 One cannot help but suspect that Barth had imbibed at least some of the nineteenth century thought that he so abhorred. In this case, it was that liberal reaction to Chalcedonian Christology that will not accept the Hypostatic Union on its very metaphysical terms. Yet it is the Bible that has the Word preceding the flesh assumed (Jn. 1:1-3, 14).

Presuppositions of Natural and Supernatural Revelation

It is quite clear that for Hodge, natural theology is insufficient for salvation (ST, I.28), yet very useful in a way that “no man can decide for other men” as to how persuasive this or that argument is for God’s existence (ST, I.23). What matters for us here is how Hodge’s view of nature is diametrically opposed to Barth’s. The view of Hodge has been called “objectivist” in one critique. In his Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, John Frame contrasts the theologies of Hodge and Schleiermacher, the latter being “subjectivist.” What is the essence of this objectivism and what makes it problematic? While Frame certainly preferred Hodge’s approach over the exaltation of sentiment in the liberal theologians, yet to speak of “objective facts,” was tantamount to making such facts “neutral,” or “brute facts,” that is, to be what they are apart from any interpretation.4

The Reformed classicalist would say that this critique confuses the order of being with the order of knowing. To speak of the nature of things being what they are (A=A), apart from our subjectivity, does not imply that the “objective” is independent of all minds and interpretations. Rather it only implies that such truth is independent of all finite minds and interpretations. We will have to return to the peculiar post-Kantian definition of “objective” that is as uncritically accepted by Van Tillians as it is by Barthians. For now let us note only that Hodge took the objective approach in the traditional sense.

Barth was not without his own metaphysics. At first it can seem at one with Thomism: God as the one being for whom his essence is to be. More than that, God is in pure act. We will come to the distinctly Barthian twist to this—to become—that one cannot help but see rooted in Hegel’s dialectic. For now we need to see how this pits supernatural Christocentrism against all competitors in nature. McCormack says Barth has God becoming in the act of revelation, and that by a “primal decision” in eternity.5 In all that God reveals he is the Actor, such that man cannot be the manipulator. Man can neither dissect nor wield the Word. All revelation is thus sovereign, Trinitarian self-disclosure. More recent theologians like Jenson, Webster, McCormack, and Vanhoozer seem to have appropriated some essential core of Barth’s values, yet with various modifications. With a hint of Rahner’s Rule redeemed, they want to insist that, “The economic drama (God blessing creatures) thus corresponds to the immanent drama (God’s blessedness in himself).”6 So Christ is the telos of all revelation, yet he is incarnated into the context of the whole economy of creation and redemption, all of which is divine speech.

Thompson summarizes this concept: “His entire theological project is predicated on a refusal to separate the revelation of God from God the Revealer, his act from his being.”7 And it is exactly at this point, of a thing becoming what it is in act, that Treier believes Barth has been misunderstood.8 Barth recognized that God is God in himself, apart from the incarnation, yet he maintains that “God’s essence is ‘something which we shall encounter either at the place where God deals with us as Lord and Savior, or not at all.”9 One’s definition of revelation is the crucible for whether one will speak of God on his terms or whether one will claim to ascend to the heavens. The parallel to Luther’s “theology of the cross” versus a “theology of glory” is clear at this point.

How does revelation come down to the Scriptures, given Barth’s seeming antipathy to any other form? He makes a division between the Word of God that Christ is, and the words of the Bible as being the witness to the Word: “Hence dogmatics as such does not ask what the prophets and apostles said but what we must say on the basis of the apostles and prophets” (CD, I.1.2).

Within his doctrine of inspiration, the human author stands in between the two events, both of which we may call an encounter with God’s Word. First, God spoke the words to the biblical authors. These men then wrote down the words we have in the Bible. So there is a sense in which the writings are God’s word, but specifically in the sense that they were “recollecting” revelation (CD, I.3.19.1).

Hodge would naturally have taken issue with this. For him, the inspiration of Scripture extends to the very words: “A mere human report or record of a divine revelation must of necessity be not only fallible, but more or less erroneous,” and after all, “The thoughts are in the words. The two are inseparable.” From theory to our own experience of reading Scripture, he continues, “Constantly it is the very words of Scripture which are quoted as of divine authority” (ST, I.164).

While Scripture was sufficient as God’s word for Hodge, there is still work to do for the theologian. He said, “The Bible is no more a system of theology, than nature is a system of chemistry or of mechanics” (ST, I.1). What Hodge does is to draw an analogy between the natural scientist and the theologian. This would make nature and Scripture the analogous “storehouses” of facts (ST, I.10, 11). While biblical theology traces out that data, systematic theology arranges them by topic and demonstrates the relationship of these doctrines to each other (ST, I.1-2). This all assumes that theology will succeed to the degree that the Bible is already a kind of integrated whole. But this presents us with a dilemma. Hodge heads section 6 of Chapter 1 by saying “The Scriptures contain all the Facts of Theology.” But is that a fact? If not, then it is a false statement. If so, then where is it in Scripture? He acknowledges general revelation truths come to bear here, but adds that they are all “recognized and authenticated in the Scriptures” (ST, I.15). If he means that they are generally encompassed by Scripture, very well. He was unclear at best on this matter, a subject we will return to in our final section on method.

Barth relates Scripture’s “place” to obedience. The Bible cannot have any reason “behind” it if the church is to run “ahead” of it. Left to right, nature cannot be first, or else the Bible cannot be first and the church following. He wrote,

“We will leave it to the Bible itself, if we are to be obedient to it, to vindicate itself by what takes place, i.e., to vindicate the witness to divine revelation which we have heard in it, to repeat itself in such a way that it can again be apprehended by the obedient man and everyone else. If the obedient man tries to base his obedience on some other calling, as though that were necessary, then at once his obedience is called in question as obedience. Where the lordship of the triune God is a fact, it is itself the basis, and a sufficient basis, for obedience” (CD, I.3.19.1).

Any attempt to ground Scripture is some reality behind Scripture is tantamount to idolatry. It is to reduce the supernatural to the natural, divine revelation to human reason, the scandal of the cross to the philosophers. 

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1. John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Philipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1987), 77-78; George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford, 1980), 113-15; Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 97-98, 182-84.

2. Cornelius Van Til, Christianity and Barthianism (Philipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1962); E. L. Mascall, Via Media (New York: Longmans Publishing, 1956), 34-39; 137-38; 154

3. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 179

4. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 77, 78.

5. Bruce McCormack, Mapping Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 14.

6. Mark D. Thompson, “Revelation, Sola Scriptura, and Regenerate Human Reason,” in Christopher C. Green & David I. Starling, ed., Revelation & Reason in Christian Theology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 241.

7. Thompson, “Revelation, Sola Scriptura, and Regenerate Human Reason,” 232.

8. Daniel Treier, “Scripture and Hermeneutics,” in McCormack, Mapping Modern Theology, 82.

9. Barth quoted in Steven J. Duby, God in Himself, 133.