PROCLAIMING CHRIST: THOMAS AQUINAS AND KARL BARTH ON HANDING ON THE WORD

300 Pages·2016·1.57 MB·English

by  Alison Cawley

PROCLAIMING CHRIST: THOMAS AQUINAS AND KARL BARTH ON HANDING
ON THE WORD OF GOD IN HUMAN WORDS

Dissertation
Submitted to
The College of Arts and Sciences of the
UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
The Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Theology

By
Matthew David Archer

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON
Dayton, Ohio
August 2016
PROCLAIMING CHRIST: THOMAS AQUINAS AND KARL BARTH ON HANDING
ON THE WORD OF GOD IN HUMAN WORDS

Name: Archer, Matthew David
APPROVED BY:

___________________________________________
Matthew J. Levering, Ph.D.
Committee Chair

___________________________________________
Vincent J. Miller, Ph.D.
Committee Member

___________________________________________
Jana M. Bennett, Ph.D.
Committee Member

___________________________________________
Brad J. Kallenberg, Ph.D.
Committee Member

___________________________________________
Reinhard Hütter, Ph.D.
Committee Member
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ABSTRACT

PROCLAIMING CHRIST: THOMAS AQUINAS AND KARL BARTH ON HANDING
ON THE WORD OF GOD IN HUMAN WORDS

Name: Archer, Matthew David
University of Dayton

Advisor: Dr. Matthew Levering
This dissertation seeks to offer an account of the presence of the Word of God in
human words, the presence of Jesus in the Church’s speech about him. This topic is
explored by taking Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth as interlocutors, framing an
ecumenical and systematic approach to analyzing the mystery of the Church’s preaching
and teaching through comparing and contrasting their works on the Word of God. Special
focus is on the role of handing on the Word in three genres: biblical exegesis, sermons,
and systematic presentations of Christian doctrine (summa and dogmatics). My aim is to
offer a Catholic and ecumenical theology of the Word of God: my three-genre focus is
essential to this task.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...iii
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1
CHAPTER ONE: AQUINAS’S COMMENTARY ON ROMANS.....................................34
CHAPTER TWO: BARTH’S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS............................................65
CHAPTER THREE: AQUINAS’S SUMMA THEOLOGIAE.........................................101
CHAPTER FOUR: BARTH’S CHURCH DOGMATICS…............................................152
CHAPTER FIVE: AQUINAS’S SERMONS…………………………………………..187
CHAPTER SIX: BARTH’S SERMONS……………………………………………….214
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………235
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………265
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INTRODUCTION

It has become common in recent years for many observers of Catholicism to
speak of a “crisis in catechesis” or a crisis in Catholic preaching.1 These “crises” have
extended to the interpretation of scripture as well: as John Cavadini has noted, a “gap”
has opened in catechesis “between “scripture” on the one hand, and “doctrine” or
“dogma” on the other.”2 My dissertation aims to address such crises and questions from a
theological rather than a purely practical perspective. Yet the theology I aim to work with
here is itself deeply practical, in that I am interested in how the risen Jesus, the Son or

1 I.e., Joseph Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the Sources of Faith” in Handing on the Faith in an Age
of Disbelief (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 13; see also his description of a “crisis in Christian
preaching” in Dogma and Preaching: Applying Christian Doctrine to Daily Life, trans. Michael J. Miller
and Matthew J. O’Connell (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 77. This “crisis” is by no means limited to
Catholics: the Protestant ethicist Stanley Hauerwas notes that contemporary preaching among Mainline
Protestants is beset by a “lack of trust many who preach have that God will show up in the words we
use…If God is not so present, then the sermon is but another ‘talk.’” Stanley Hauerwas, A Cross-Shattered
Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009), 18.
2 John Cavadini, “Scripture, Doctrine, and Proclamation: the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the
Renewal of Homiletics,” Letter & Spirit 4 (2008): 246. In his book Jesus of Nazareth, Joseph Ratzinger
notes that the time has come to “recognize the limits of the historical-critical method itself,” because this
method by itself does not have the capacity to make the word of Scripture “into something present today.”
Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian
Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), xvi. These questions are not only asked by dogmatic or historical
theologians, but many biblical scholars as well, in the context of growing interest in theological exegesis of
Scripture. Joel Green offers one instance:
Biblical studies is accustomed to “hearing voices” [i.e., the voice of redactors or the community
behind the text], then, but it has not made a practice of enabling its practitioners to hear the divine
voice—except, in some circles, as a secondary or tertiary task, a derivative step in the
hermeneutical process, as through God could speak only after history had spoken. Hear the words
of the liturgy:
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
The question, then, is how to hear in the words of Scripture the word of God speaking in the
present tense. This is (and not simply was and/or might somehow become) the Word of the Lord.
Joel Green, Practicing Theological Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 5.
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Word of God, turns the hearts of believers to himself through the words of human
intermediaries, whether in preaching, in the interpretation of scripture, or in systematic
dogmatic reflection. How exactly is Christ, the incarnate Word, “present” in the words of
Christian preaching? How does learning about Christ, through study of the words of
scripture or doctrinal reflection, actually bring a person into contact with the living Jesus,
the Word of God?1 How can the Church, in human words, define Jesus Christ as the
incarnate Word at the Council of Chalcedon, and what is the status of the Church’s
words?
One of the most profound teachings of the Catholic tradition is its assertion of
Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist, along with its emphasis on how the other
sacraments connect believers to Christ. But there seems to be a lack of contemporary
emphasis among Catholic ministers and theologians on of the question of how Christ,
who is the divine Word incarnate, is made present in words, particularly the words of
preaching and the words of scripture. The Lutheran and Reformed traditions of Protestant
Christianity, partly on a polemical basis of defining themselves over against the Catholic
emphasis on the seven sacraments, have on the other hand developed a strong emphasis
on the presence of the incarnate Word in the words of Scripture and in the words of
preaching.2

1 These issues are addressed, with a philosophical focus on the notion that “God speaks,” by
Nicholas Wolterstorff in his book Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God
Speaks (New York: Cambridge, 2000).
2 The Reformed Second Helvetic Confession of 1564 declares that “the preaching of the Word of God is
the Word of God,” and, commenting on Romans 10:17, “faith comes from hearing and hearing from the
Word of God by the preaching of Christ,” argues that the gospel is in most cases proclaimed to hearers
through such preachers, in spite of the personal character of the minister (The Presbyterian Church
(U.S.A.), Book of Confessions: Study Edition (Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 1999), 93-4 (Article I). The
Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530 declares that in order for believers to obtain the gift of faith, “the
Ministry of Teaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments was instituted. For through the Word
and Sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Ghost is given, who works faith; where and when it
pleases God, in them that hear the Gospel, to wit, that God, not for our own merits, but for Christ’s sake,
2
While it might seem that a strong theological understanding of the presence of the
incarnate Word in the words of Scripture and in the preached word might only be a
Protestant gift, the Catholic tradition has many resources for a rich theological
understanding of how the Word of God can be present in human words.3 I argue in this
dissertation that Thomas Aquinas stands out as such a resource, not only on an
intellectual level, but on a pastoral level as well. Scripture and preaching are seen by
Aquinas as ways the Triune God joins believers to himself through the mediation of
human words. If we follow Aquinas’s use of the term “instrument,” then we can see that
scripture and preaching are “sacramental” realities for Aquinas.4 The words of inspired
scripture and the words of preaching are, in a sense, a divine action, the work of the Holy
Spirit. But the Spirit is working through the mediation of human words. Human words
become instruments in the process of an ascent of the mind to the Word of God and thus

justifies those who believe that they are received into grace for Christ’s sake” (Evangelical Lutheran Synod
of Missouri, Ohio, and Other states, Triglot Condorcia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church: German-Latin-English (St. Louis: Concordia, 1921), Article V, accessed March 23, 2016,
http://bookofconcord.org/index.php). For a recent Protestant (Lutheran) perspective on the sacramentality
of the preached Word, see Joshua Genig, Viva Vox: Recovering the Sacramentality of the Word through the
Annunciation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015).
3 The Fathers of the Church, for instance Origen and Augustine, emphasized the presence of Christ in
preaching and in scripture. See William G. Rusch, “Preaching” in The Westminster Handbook to Origen,
ed. John McGuckin (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 177-8; Peter Sanlon,
Augustine’s Theology of Preaching (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). There also was a movement of
retrieval of this theme of the presence of Christ in the preached and written word among Catholics in the
1960s, exemplified by Michael Schmaus, Preaching as a Saving Encounter, trans. J. Holland Smith (New
York: Society of St. Paul, 1966); Otto Semmelroth, The Preaching Word: On the Theology of
Proclamation, trans. John Jay Hughes, (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965); Louis Bouyer, The Word,
Church, and Sacraments in Protestantism and Catholicism, trans. A.V. Littledale (New York: Desclee,
1961); Jean Daniélou, The Salvation of the Nations, trans. Angeline Bouchard (Notre Dame, IN: Notre
Dame Press, 1965); see also Yves Congar, Tradition and traditions: An historical and a theological essay:
one volume edition, trans. Michal Naseby and Thomas Rainborough (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 376-
409. John Behr offers an Eastern Orthodox perspective on the theological event and mystery of preaching,
drawing on John Chrysostom, in an insightful lecture, “The Pastoral Power of Theology: Saint John the
Golden-Mouthed,” (lecture, St John Chrysostom Orthodox Church, House Springs, Missouri, September
29, 2007), accessed March 23, 2016, http://russianorthodox-stl.org/pastoral_power.html.
4 B.-D. de la Soujeole, “La mystère de la predication,” Revue Thomiste 107/3 (2007): 355-374.
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to the Father in the Spirit.5 Aquinas discusses the mediation of human words in a manner
which includes an incredibly positive valuation of human nature under grace and of the
human capacity, in the Spirit, to know the Word and grow in the Word, since human
beings were created with a natural affinity for the Word.6 Aquinas offers a theology of
the Word in the context of his highly developed understanding of how created things,
especially human beings, can participate in Christ’s mediation of revelation and
salvation: this is his crucial contribution, I argue.
In this dissertation, I seek to retrieve Aquinas’s theological understanding of
handing on the Word of God alongside the greatest recent Protestant theology of the
Word of God: the work of Karl Barth.7 In the first phase of his career, Barth wrote as a

5 On human words and theology as a spiritual exercise or ascent of the mind (or wisdom) in Aquinas, see
Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 28-39; Mark Johnson,
“The Sapiential Character of the First Article of the Summa theologiae” in Philosophy and the God of
Abraham (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1991), 85-98.
6 Cf. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Notre
Dame, Indiana: Christian Classics, 1948), III.3.8. See also Thomas Joseph White, “Through him all things
were made” (John 1:3): The Analogy of the Word Incarnate according to St. Thomas Aquinas and Its
Ontological Presuppositions,” in The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God?,
Thomas Joseph White, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 246-279; and Josef Pieper, Guide to St.
Thomas Aquinas, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 117-133.
Aquinas’s approach to the intersection of faith and human capacities of knowing has been presented as a
helpful model for theologians in the present, provided such a contemporary theology and metaphysics
involves dialogue with contemporary historical studies and natural science, by Benedict Ashley and
Thomas Joseph White. Benedict Ashley, “Transition to Historical Mindedness” in The Ashley Reader:
Redeeming Reason (Naples, FL: Sapientia, 2006), 13-25; Thomas Joseph White, “The Precarity of
Wisdom: Modern Dominican Theology, Perspectivalism, and the Tasks of Reconstruction” in
Ressourcement Thomism: Essays in Honor of Romanus Cessario (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University
of America Press, 2010), 92-123.
7 The enterprise of Catholic dialogue with Karl Barth has a long and interesting history. The most notable
example of such dialogue is Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological engagement with Karl Barth. Balthasar’s
reading of Barth is squarely focused on theological questions of ecumenical dialogue with Protestants.
Balthasar considers that Barth offers “the most thorough and penetrating display of the Protestant view and
the closest rapprochement with the Catholic.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth (San
Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), 22-3. Other significant works on Barth by Catholic theologians include Henri
Bouillard, Karl Barth, 3 vols, (Paris: Aubier, 1957); Hans Küng, Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth
and a Catholic Reflection (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004). Of special significance
for this dissertation especially is Yves Congar’s discussion of Barth in Tradition and Traditions: An
Historical and a Theological Essay: One Volume Edition, trans. Michal Naseby and Thomas Rainborough
(New York: Macmillan, 1966), 281; 404-6, which will play a major role in my final conclusion, and, less
present in this dissertation but still important for shaping my approach to Barth, Louis Bouyer’s discussion
of Barth in The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, trans. A. V. Littledale (Maryland: Newman Press,
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pastor concerned with the needs of the local parish, typified by his working class parish
in Safenwil, Switzerland. In this context, Barth was focused on recovering the notion that
God speaks, in all its theological depth, and he did this by a particularly Protestant kind
of ressourcement, turning to a close theological exegesis of Paul’s letter to the Romans,
published as his Epistle to the Romans.8 Later in his life, when he wrote his multivolume
work on Christian doctrine, the Church Dogmatics, Barth retrieved from the Protestant
tradition the notion that the words of preachers in a local parish, when preaching is
rightly based on Scripture, are by God’s power a divine word, the Word of God.9 In his
Church Dogmatics, Barth takes the Word of God preached, written, and revealed as the
criterion of dogmatic theology.10 Barth even remarks that “God commits Himself with
His eternal Word to the preaching of the Christian Church.”11 Barth emphasizes the
presence and action of God in each "moment" of mediation: God is directly at work in the

1961), 152-157. These and other Catholic engagements with Barth are discussed extensively and given
historical context by Benjamin Dahlke in his book Karl Barth, Catholic Renewal and Vatican II (New
York: T&T Clark, 2012).
8 Barth explains that “it simply came about that the familiar situation of the minister on Saturday at his desk
and on Sunday in his pulpit crystallized in my case into a marginal note to all theology, which finally
assumed a voluminous form of a complete commentary upon the Epistle to the Romans” (Karl Barth, “The
Need and Promise of Christian Preaching” in The Word of God and the Word of Man (New York: Harper,
1957), 101). After reading Franz Overbeck’s posthumous publications, along with philosophical works by
Søren Kierkegaard and works by his brother Heinrich Barth, Barth decided in 1920 to write a revised
commentary on Romans, which he completed in eleven months (Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, trans.
Edwyn Hoskyns (New York: Oxford, 1969), 3-4; Busch 115-7). This second edition, essentially a second
commentary, is often referred to in secondary literature as “Romans II.” It was Barth’s second-edition
commentary that made him famous, because in this second edition Barth fully rethought the intellectual
task of biblical exegesis in light of a clearer articulation of the “independent sovereignty” of God’s
approach to humanity through the words of Scripture (cf. Busch, 119). In his second edition commentary,
this freedom was especially articulated through recourse to paradox. Barth’s writing in “Romans II” was
immediately received as something shocking, or even violent: the “bombshell in the playground of the
theologians” (Karl Adam, “Die Theologie der Krisis,” Hochland 23:2 (1926): 271-86).
9 Martin Luther said that “every honest pastor’s and preacher’s mouth is Christ’s mouth, and his word and
forgiveness is Christ’s word and forgiveness…we do well to call the pastor’s and preacher’s word when he
preacheth, God’s Word. For the office is not the pastor’s or the preacher’s, but God’s.” Quoted in Karl
Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York: T&T Clark, 1955), 98-140. Hereafter
abbreviated to “CD I/I.”.
10 Barth, CD I/1, 98-140.
11 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight, eds. G.W. Bromiley and
T.F. Torrance (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson, 2010), 745. Hereafter abbreviated to “CD I/2.”
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apostolic authorship of scripture and in the preaching of the Word in the present. This
offers a deeply theocentric understanding of scripture and preaching: ultimately a
theocentric understanding of the liturgy. Handing on the Word always in some way
involves God speaking, even though there are humans doing the speaking. While
awareness of this mystery of God’s act of being revealed through human words is present
in Aquinas, it is understated in his thought, and underrepresented in Thomist theology.
While Barth, like Aquinas, seems to allow for some role of human words in
handing on the Word of God, I have chosen to work with Barth along with Aquinas
because he also raises some key theological questions about such mediation. First of all,
Barth understood this mediation to take place in an “actualist” manner: by this I mean
that God’s work of speaking through Scripture or through the preaching of the gospel
does not depend on some inherent quality that these possess. Rather, God enacts
revelation by a divine act in each instance.12 Secondly, we must note that, as a twentieth
century Protestant pastor and theologian, Barth did not see dogmas as binding. Barth
thought that the only binding dogma for Christian theologians is the “dogma” (in the
sense of “proclamation”) of the name “Jesus Christos.”13 Vigorous debate has appeared

12 George Hunsinger observes that Barth’s “actualism” is a “motif” in his theology wherein Barth
“emphasizes the sovereign activity of God in patterns of love and freedom – not only in God’s self-
relationship, but in relationship to others.” George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of his
Theology (New York: Oxford, 1991), 30. This “actualism” involves denying the possibility of an
“ahistorical” relationship to God (based in natural theology, understanding God’s being in “static or
inactive terms” separate from God’s free revealing act). Instead, “our relationship to God must be
understood in active, historical terms, and it must be a relationship given to us strictly from the outside”
(31). Henri Bouillard, an early Catholic interpreter of Barth, describes this gist of this “actualism” well:
“Même communiqué, Dieu n’est jamais possédé: toujours objet d’espérance, toujours à venir, sa presence
est à chaque instant un future éternel” (Henri Bouillard, Karl Barth: Genèse et Évolution de la Théologie
Dialectique volume I (Montaigne, 1957), 259).
13 “The answer of the New Testament to our question about the reality of God’s revelation is to be found in
the constant reiteration in all its pages of the name Jesus Christ. This name is God’s revelation, or to be
more exact, the definition of revelation arising out of revelation itself, taken from it and answering to it.”
Barth, CD I/2, 10. See also CD I/1, 307-309. In a phrase which Barth himself notes can sound misleading,
Barth calls dogma an “eschatological concept.” Barth, CD I/1, 309. Dogma is eschatological because of
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