When setting out his approach to expounding the doctrine of reconciliation in Church Dogmatics IV.I , Barth laments what he sees as a clear shift in Post-Reformation Protestant theology (both scholasticism and pietism) toward the direct application of salvation to individuals by faith without reference to the church, which then is relegated to the status of the means for individual salvation:

"It was an intolerable truncation of the Christian message when the older Protestantism steered the whole doctrine of the atonement - and with it, the whole of theology - into the cul de sac of the question of the individual experience of grace, which is always an anxious one when taken in isolation, the question of individual conversion by it and to it, and of its presuppositions and consequences. The almost inevitable result was that the great concepts of justification and sanctification came more and more to be understood and filled out psychologically and biographically, and the doctrine of the Church seemed to be of value only as a description of the means of salvation and grace indispensable to this individual and personal process of salvation....

....Certainly the question of the subjective apprehension of atonement by the individual man is absolutely indispensable. And it belongs properly to the concluding section of the doctrine of reconciliation - yet not in the first place, but in the second...." (Dogmatics IV.I, Bromiley trans., section 58.4).