A tool like Logos Bible Software allows much more penetrating study of Barth's Dogmatics than has ever been practically feasible before. For instance, we can now perform searches across the entire Dogmatics for words and phrases like "scholastics" and "Protestant scholasticism." This enables us to better judge how Barth uses such designations, to whom he applies them, and on what basis he does so.
Freed from the static limits of a printed index (no matter how reliable or comprehensive), the research implications for such search capabilities are enormous. A simple search for the term "scholastic" in Barth's Dogmatics reveals that he associates the term with eras of theology both preceding (i.e. medieval scholasticism) and following (i.e. Protestant scholasticism) the dawning of the Reformation in the early sixteenth century. Moreover, as in an excursus on the "Federal Theology" of the seventeenth century, we see that Barth views these eras to be characterized by rigidity and legalism.
The results of such searches also show us that Barth is dependent to a great extent on the manuals and handbooks of Protestant theology flowing out of the nineteenth century, such as those from Heinrich Heppe and Alexander Schweizer. But where Schweizer, for instance, views predestination as a "central dogma" in Calvinism in a generally positive light, Barth takes issue with the normative judgment on such matters.
So not only is Barth drawing off the scholarship of preceding generations, materially accepting their interpretation of the development of Protestant orthodoxy, but he is also dependent on an interpretation of these sources themselves as self-evident. Thus, when Barth summarizes Cocceius, we see a reading of Cocceius as dismissing wholesale the entirety of Protestant scholastic theology: "traditional dogmatics had started to move like a frozen stream of lava" (4.1, p. 55). Cocceius "anti-Scholasticus" becomes a seventeenth-century version of Calvin in the latter's storied rejection of the "scholastici."
The dynamic that we see at work here in Barth's interpretation of the development of Federal Theology, pitting Calvin as the paradigmatic norm against divergent streams of Protestant scholasticism, is also at play in his systemic and methodological rejection of natural law, natural theology, and natural revelation.
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