The genesis and systematic function of the filioque in Karl Barth's Church dogmatics /

Karl Barth (1886-1968) was an ardent defender of the filioque, the doctrine which states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Generally, scholarly analysis is restricted to Barth's defence of the filioque in the first half volume of the Church Dogmatics. However, this thesis proceeds on the assumption that a fuller understanding of the filioque in Barth must take into account the genesis and development of the doctrine in his earlier thought. A latent dialectical christocentric pneumatology in the second edition of Romans (1921) provides the material theological support for the doctrine, which subsequently appears in a formal discussion of the filioque in the Gottingen Dogmatics (1924). There Barth speaks of the filioque as a theological analogy of the structure of his developing doctrine of the threefold Word of God. As preaching proceeds from revelation and Scripture, so too the Spirit is to be understood as proceeding from the Father and the Son.Barth continues to defend and apply the filioque in the Church Dogmatics, though the original connection to the threefold form of the Word of God recedes into the background. Instead, the filioque functions systematically both as a theological guarantee of the unity of the work of the Son and the Spirit and as the eternal ground of fellowship between God and humanity. Barth's most mature view of the filioque is construed in dialectical terms whereby the Spirit is understood to be eternally active in uniting and differentiating the Father and the Son. Furthermore, Barth is atypical in the Western filioquist tradition because he refuses to speak of the filioque in terms of a "double procession"; rather, he views the Spirit as proceeding from the common being-of-the-Father-and-the-Son. Barth's stance on the filioque does not result in a form of pneumatological subordinationism, as critics often maintain. Rather, his adoption of the filioque reflects a tendency toward a superordination of the Spirit over Father and Son in a structurally similar way to Hegel's pneumatology. The thesis concludes by pointing to a tension in Barth's thought which in practice tends toward a conflation of economic and immanent Trinity as he reads back into God the problem and confrontation he perceives to exist between God and humanity