the word for the day

Barth, CD I/2, p.842:

... [we] exclude the possibility of a romantic dogmatics, a dogmatics which does not start honestly from the Church of the present day, but goes back more or less successfully to the past and critically or uncritically tries to think and speak from the standpoint of a past century of the Church. Now it is implied in what we have defined as its confessional attitude that dogmatics has to think and speak in constant contact with the history of the Church, in the unity of the Church of all time. But this does not mean that it must pretend to be a primitive Christian dogmatics or one belonging to the 4th or 16th or 17th century, though if it did, in many respects it would no doubt be more imposing, profound and pious, more rich in content, than if tried to be simply a modern dogmatics speaking in and to the Church of the present. If we think we can meet the needs of the contemporary generation by retiring to the secure ground of a better epoch of the past, and engaging in a process of excavating and rehabilitating, we may obtain the specious results which can always be obtained when ghosts are conjured. But we must add that the Church is not edified by magic of this kind, and that therefore dogmatics must divest itself of romantic as of every other form of magic. The ghosts even of the true Church of the past may lead the Church astray and into temptation no less than the spirits of the present.

How perfectly put!