Credo. Karl Barth

       I

       CREDO

      THE attempt to state and to answer the “chief problems of Dogmatics” is here to be undertaken “with reference to the Apostles’ Creed”.

      It will not be our business to inquire into the origin of this text. What is in mind is that Credo which has been familiar since the eighth century; which, already known about the year 200 and pointing back to a still earlier period, succeeded in establishing itself, in the various forms of a Roman symbol, in the Christian West; which passed into the Rituale Romanum and was then recognised by the Churches of the Reformation also, as the fundamental confession of the common Christian faith. Nor does a historical analysis of this text come within our purview. We use it simply as a basis for theological investigations, in the course of which we shall necessarily have to understand and explain it not only in the light of its own time, but also in the light of the whole (and therefore also of the later) historical development.

      The Credo is fitted to be the basis of a discussion of the chief problems of Dogmatics not only because it furnishes, as it were, a ground-plan of Dogmatics but above all because the meaning, aim and essence of Dogmatics and the meaning, aim and essence of the Credo, if they are not identical, yet stand in the closest connection. In this first lecture we attempt to refer from the conception of Credo, as it stands at the head of the symbol (at once as beginning and title) to the conception in which we are interested, that of Dogmatics.

      1. Like the corresponding Greek πιστεύω, Credo at the head of the symbol means first of all quite simply the act of recognition—in the shape of definite cognitions won from God’s revelation—of the reality of God in its bearing upon man. Faith therefore is a decision—the exclusion of unbelief in, the overcoming of opposition to, this reality, the affirmation of its existence and validity. Man believes. And therefore: man makes this decision, credo. But what gives faith its seriousness and power is not that man makes a decision, nor even the way in which he makes it, his feelings, the movement of his will, the existential emotion generated. On the contrary, faith lives by its object. It lives by the call to which it responds. It lives by that, because and in so far as that is the call of God: credo in unum Deum … et in Jesum Christum … et in Spiritum sanctum. The seriousness and the power of faith are the seriousness and power of the truth, which is identical with God Himself, and which the believer has heard and received in the form of definite truths, in the form of articles of faith. And even the disclosure of this truth is a free gift that positively comes to meet the believing man. It is God’s own revelation. In believing, man obeys by his decision the decision of God.

      All this holds for Dogmatics also. It, too, is human recognition of the reality of God as it is revealed. It, too, lives by the truth that comes to man—as