Many times in my religious experience I’ve had a desire to throw the baby out with the bath water because of the sheer stupidity of the present. I’m sure I’m not alone there either. For example, when reading about early church history and practices I would imperiously declare that the Greco-Roman Gentile converts-turned-leaders had gotten it all wrong. It was because of this confusion that Christendom was in such a sorry state today or so I thought. Naturally, the only real alternative was to throw everything out and start from the beginning. It took quite some time to realize that this beginning-ness had problems of its own. Where was the beginning? This jettisoning of tradition (whatever was left to begin with), the community of faith (past and present) and the general attitude of mistrust, however, made it nearly impossible to recover any sort of religious bearings. Barth is amazing because he manages to understand this dilemma and chart a course that avoids the problems that come from this type reaction and yet remain fluid enough to introduce needed corrections to the community. Barth will not allow everything to be discarded. He may give away too much in assuming that the community of faith did not go critically awry in the not-so-distant past, but he does not create an ivory tower out of this community of the past that is hitherto immutable.

Certainly, the assumption behind all this will be that the community itself may have been on the right track in the recent or remote past, or at any rate on a not altogether crooked path. Consequently, fundamental trust instead of mistrust will be the initial attitude of theology toward the tradition which determines the present-day Church. And any questions and proposals which theology has to direct to the tradition will definitely not be forced on the community like a decree; any such findings will be presented for consideration only as well-weighed suggestions. Nevertheless, no ecclesiastical authority should be allowed by theology to hinder it from honestly pursuing its critical task, and the same applies to any frightened voices from the midst of the rest of the congregation. The task of theology is to discuss freely the reservations as well as the proposals for improvement which occur to it in reflection on the inherited witness of the community.

– Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology (Eerdmans, 1963) 43.

–Update: Did anyone notice that I used the word ‘hitherto’?