Karl Barth (1886–1968) conceived two of his small dogmatics, Credo (1935) and Dogmatics in Outline (1947), as explanations of the Apostles’ Creed. He refers to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in nine of the twelve volumes of his life’s work, the monumental Church Dogmatics (1932–1967). The most comprehensive interpretation of the Nicene Creed is provided in its first volume (1932). Here Barth rejects Melanchthon’s reduction of Christology to soteriology and, in opposition to the christology and pneumatology from below, which dominated Protestant liberal theology, builds a trinitarian christology and pneumatology from above, following the dogma of the ancient Church. In the KD I/1 we find not only variations on the well-known catholic formulations, but also two innovative formulations that coincide with the Karl Rahner’s later famous theologumena: statements identifying the immanent and economic Trinity and the proposal to speak of three “modes of being” of the Triune God rather than of three personae of the Holy Trinity.
Jan Štefan (Tue,) studied this question.