Karl Barth - Raging Against the System(atic Theology)
George Hunsinger summarizes Barth's rejection of systematized theology: … The idea of a divine determinism or monism posits a kind of “mechanism” and “fatalism” that Barth finds to be characteristic of “metaphysical dogmas” (IV/2, 494). Metaphysical dogmas attempt to “systematize” divine and human actions. They attempt to conceive these actions within a rationally comprehensible explanatory scheme. Within the scheme they attempt to explain how these actions are related. They appeal to a supposedly higher principle or a supposedly higher order which stands above the actions and normalizes them. Above all, they assume that God is accessible to ordinary schemes of explanation. The ontological difference in order between divine and human actions (which for Barth is ineradicable) is conceived as one that can be resolved and removed. Metaphysical dogmas, in other words, derive explanatory schemes from general observations which are then applied to the case of divine and human actions...