The Church Dogmatics is Barth's attempt to sum up everything he thought about the practical implications of theology. The text is interesting for any number of historical and scholarly reasons, though my interest in it (at the moment) falls into neither category. I find that, like John Calvin, he is an approachable and humane character with occasional deep insight into human motivation, which he treats with sympathy and not with cold analytic rigor. The passage I am quoting here represents his first, brief attempt to work through the implications of a sola gratia theology in which human behavior appears to not matter very much at all:
Human experience and thought as such, if they were to follow their own bias, would proceed in a straight line from despair to even deeper despair, from solemnity to even greater solemnity (there is also a negative theologia gloriae), or from triumph to even higher triumph, from joy to even greater joy. To faith, however, this straight line movement is forbidden by the Word of God which calls us from despair to triumph, from solemnity to joy, but also from triumph to despair and joy to solemnity. This is the theologia crucis. So, in this discipline by His Word, which never leaves us alone whether in our humility or our pride, God is faithful to Himself and to us, always, then, in an unequivocal one-sided advance or retreat in which the other side remains unsaid and everything depends on our hearing it either way as said by God.
The theology of glory, the path of mysticism**, the via affirmativa and the via negativa place all their emphasis on individual human action: if we do not proceed from victory to victory, the fault must lie within us. The theologia crucis is an attempt to recognize that an unending string of successes, an unending personal progress, is hostile to what it means to be human. We go from moments of victory to moments of failure, and spend a good deal of time not knowing which one we are in (often the success or failure of a moment does not reveal itself until long after the moment has passed). The victories are not wholly ours, but neither are the failures, and both may yet be redeemed.
* He is not, contra Mark Lilla's irresponsible speculations, a believer in political theology of any kind, much less a forerunner to Carl Schmitt, (who was Catholic, and not Reformed, in any event, at a time when that differentiation meant something), and repudiated the language of 'krisis' as being too reductive for the political and religious situation of interwar Germany. End academic tangent.
** The small-type text just before this passage is also of interest. It serves as a brief and effective demolition of almost all Christian mysticism: "An important difference between faith and mysticism is that the mystic as such denies this reversal; in ecstasy before unveiled Deity he ceases to be aware of the veiling; he regards proclamation, Bible and Christ in their secularity as mere symbols of the Godhead now unveiled to him, which have now become dispensable and which he can basically discard; henceforth he sees his future only in ever fuller unveilings which lead him more and more into the depths and heights. In contrast, the triumphant believer returns immediately as such to proclamation, the Bible, and Christ in their secularity; he sits down again, as it were, in the lowest room; he seeks his future only (and genuinely so) in the God who is totally concealed (not already revealed but totally concealed) from him as from every other sinner. It is in this very going and going back again that the believer as such, because both goings are at the command of the God who calls, has apart from all else an assurance that the mystic as such can never have."
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