Word: dogma
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...Christ has forced Christian thought to reconsider its basic focus. His demand that theology is necessarily church theology has caused Protestantism to take a new look at the confessions it stands by, and has thereby contributed mightily to today's worldwide ecumenical dialogue. Barth has always insisted that dogma is important, that theology is not philosophy, that Christianity is not the spiritual side of politics. The mysteries of God's Word are hard ones-but they cannot be made more palatable to nonbelievers or to the lukewarm faithful by hiding them in the language formed...
...Yardstick. Barth is a theologian's theologian, whose work in "that beautiful science" by which man seeks to know God is the yardstick that measures what other men do. His treatment of Christian dogma has soared across denominational boundaries, affecting the thought of Baptists, Lutherans and Episcopalians as well as his own Reformed Church. Preachers read him, and his thought probably affects a good share of the sermons spoken in U.S. churches any given Sunday, but laymen hardly know his name. He has far fewer disciples in the U.S. than either Niebuhr or Tillich; and even in Germany, young...
Instead of starting with a defense of dogma, liberal theology stressed the need for man to respond emotionally to the Jesus of history. Liberalism believed that religion was an expression of man's noblest impulses and that man himself had the freedom to shape his life and his world in accordance with the divine will. Faith in God was made to seem perfectly compatible with an industrial civilization's faith in science, progress and democracy; church and state would work hand in hand for man's final victory over nature, and the eventual establishment of the Kingdom...
Politics suddenly became interesting for Earth in 1933, after Adolf Hitler established the Third Reich. Barth spoke out in anger against Naziism when it attempted to create new "German Christian" churches in which National Socialist political theories were given the same sanctity as theological dogma. "This was a nationalist heresy,"he says, "confusion between God and the spirit of the German nation." He launched a new magazine to attack the "heresy" and in 1934 wrote nearly all of the Barmen Declaration-an anti-Nazi protest that claimed the autonomy of the church from all temporal power. The declaration was signed...
...SUPREME SACRED CONGREGATION OF THE HOLY OFFICE. "In Rome," says an old Vatican saw,"fear goes by the name of the Holy Office." Founded in the 13th century to combat heresy, the Holy Office ran the Inquisition, still edits the Index of Forbidden Books, preserves Catholic dogma from error, sets the terms of marriage for Catholics who wed non-Catholics. Operating under security rules that would do credit to the CIA, the Holy Office keeps its files under lock and key forever; anyone who spills its secrets is subject to automatic excommunication, revocable only by the Pope himself...