the word for the day

Barth, CD I/2, p.842:

... [we] exclude the possibility of a romantic dogmatics, a dogmatics which does not start honestly from the Church of the present day, but goes back more or less successfully to the past and critically or uncritically tries to think and speak from the standpoint of a past century of the Church. Now it is implied in what we have defined as its confessional attitude that dogmatics has to think and speak in constant contact with the history of the Church, in the unity of the Church of all time. But this does not mean that it must pretend to be a primitive Christian dogmatics or one belonging to the 4th or 16th or 17th century, though if it did, in many respects it would no doubt be more imposing, profound and pious, more rich in content, than if tried to be simply a modern dogmatics speaking in and to the Church of the present. If we think we can meet the needs of the contemporary generation by retiring to the secure ground of a better epoch of the past, and engaging in a process of excavating and rehabilitating, we may obtain the specious results which can always be obtained when ghosts are conjured. But we must add that the Church is not edified by magic of this kind, and that therefore dogmatics must divest itself of romantic as of every other form of magic. The ghosts even of the true Church of the past may lead the Church astray and into temptation no less than the spirits of the present.

How perfectly put!

locating barth

Barth, CD I/2, pp.829-832:

In this sense, and corresponding to our own direction into the Church, we have marked off the Evangelical Church as the Church of Jesus Christ from the three heresies: Neo-Protestantism, which at almost every point resembles the Evangelical Church in organization and administration but is essentially alien to it in spirit; Roman Catholicism; and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. But even when Neo-Protestantism is strictly excluded as foreign to it, as in this discussion, it is obvious that the Evangelical Church is not a unity. At least three great forms are to be distinguished in it. And to some extent they have distinguished themselves with the same definiteness as if it were a question of an opposition between the Church and one of the heretical sects. These are the Lutheran, the Reformed and the Anglican branches of the Evangelical Church. Let us admit at once that when we speak of the Evangelical Church and therefore of the Church generally in this presentation of dogmatics we mean the Evangelical Reformed Church, in conformity with our own Church position, and the fathers and the dogma to which we owe loyalty in obedience to the Word of God until we are led by that same Word to something better...

Even within the Evangelical Church we have only the one choice, which is no choice. A false choice jeopardizes the whole character of dogmatics as Church dogmatics. We must take upon ourselves a necessary opposition to other types of Evangelical dogmatics. We cannot practice indifferently Anglican, Lutheran or Reformed dogmatics, but only Reformed dogmatics. By this we mean the dogmatics of the particular Church which was purified and reconstituted by the work of Calvin and the confession which sealed his testimony.

As Reformed thinkers, it is impossible for us to say of the Anglican and Lutheran Church, as we do of the Roman Catholic Church, that in them also there is a Church; we must say of them what in view of their doctrine may seem strange and difficult to approve, that in another form they are the one Church of Jesus Christ just as much as is the Reformed Church. The grounds of objection and division are not heresies but specific errors, specific theological notions, badly, misleadingly, erroneously and arbitrarily construed, of a type which may easily arise within the Reformed Confession itself without necessitating disruption...

What we feel is that, though their doctrine is imperiled by what we consider their errors, it does not exclude them from the one Church which is ours.

Well, then.  All clear now?

ecclesiastical earnestness

Barth, CD I/2, p. 808:

...there exists in the Church, before heresy arises... the possibility that a false moralistic earnestness will dominate proclamation, as though it is man's affair whether it is victorious or defeated, as though man has to make the Word of God powerful by the weight of his own will, as though it lies in man's hands to compel decisions about it. When this is the case, the Church strengthens itself to serve the Word of God, as though it is a matter of the organization and running of a business, or the instituting and carrying through of a great law-suit, or the deployment and operations of an army... it is impossible to handle the truth this way.  As a rule, this kind of ecclesiastical earnestness involves a trimmed and therefore a truncated version of the truth. It may not be guilty of actual heresy, but it presupposes a deviation which sooner or later will lead to heresy.