Our dogmatic labours can and should be guided by results which are venerable because they are attained in the common knowledge of the Church at a specific time. Such results may be seen in the dogmas enshrined in the creeds. But at no place should these replace our [16] dogmatic labours in virtue of their authority. Nor can it ever be the real concern of dogmatics merely to assemble, repeat and define the teaching of the Bible… Exegetical theology investigates biblical teaching as the basis of our talks about God. Dogmatics, too, must constantly keep it in view. But only in God and not for us is the true basis of Christian utterance identical with its true content. Hence dogmatics as such does not ask what the apostles and prophets said but what we must say on the basis of the apostles and prophets. This task is not taken from us because it is first necessary that we should know the biblical basis.

— Karl Barth, CD I/1, 15–16. I have often seen the bolded sentence criticized as reinscribing the “broad and ugly ditch” between Scripture and theology (“Barth thinks you shouldn’t just accept the theology taught by the Biblical writers!”). But it cannot be decontextualized in that sense. There is a distinction operative for Barth, which he has already laid out, between “exegetical theology,” or biblical theology, and dogmatic theology (as well as practical theology: see pp. 4–5). Biblical theology does precisely ask what the Biblical writers taught. Dogmatic theology, in contrast, is the self-critical reflection by the Church on what she teaches: a task which for Barth requires continual return to and testing by the biblical writers, which takes seriously the fact that there is historical difference and development since the time of the apostles and prophets (not all of it benign), and which is never — can, this side of the eschaton, never be — complete.