Some Dogmatic Implications of Barth’s Understanding of Ebionite and Docetic Christology PAUL D. MOLNAR* Abstract: This article shows how Barth’s understanding of Ebionite and Docetic Christology shaped his trinitarian theology and argues that theologians today should learn from Barth in order to avoid the pitfalls of grounding Christ’s uniqueness either in experience or in an ideology instead of in Christ himself. The article exhibits how Barth’s insights relate to the views of a number of prominent contemporary theologians, illustrating how these theologians, in varying ways, actually reach problematic conclusions precisely to the extent that they do not actually begin their christological reflections with the fact that Jesus is the Son of God simply because he is. One of the most vexatious aspects of contemporary Christology is the fact that so many theologians do not begin where Karl Barth began. Hence they end by trying to build a Christology on a historically or idealistically reconstructed Jesus whose uniqueness is more a creation of the community than a reality whose genuine recognition rests upon a simple acknowledgement of his Lordship. Barth’s starting- point for thinking about the person and work of Jesus Christ was, as is well known, the simple fact of Jesus Christ himself who was the Son of God by virtue of his unique relation to the Father. This may sound like a simple or even simplistic point. But it is in fact loaded, because by this statement Barth was not only trying to say that thinking must be determined by the unique object being considered, but he was also asserting that accurate thinking about revelation (and thus about Jesus Christ) could begin neither with our ideas nor with our experiences. 1 At bottom revelation was not the disclosure of something hidden within history, but the disclosure of God himself who had entered history from outside. Beginning with ideas would lead to what he labeled Docetic Christology, while beginning with experience International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 2 Number 2 July 2000 Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. * St John’s University, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Jamaica, NY 11439, USA. 1 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4 vols. in 13 parts (hereafter referred to in text with part, volume and page). Vol. I, pt. 2: The Doctrine of the Word of God, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. G.T. Thomson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1970), p. 20.