- This is a paper I wrote for an independent study on Barth, the research for which compelled me to be a lifelong student of his. Indeed, the Church's battle against the no-god is far from over; for he lurks about wherever their are religious forms. It will do us well to listen to the one who so poignantly unmasked the no-god in the first place, so that we might adequately be prepared to do the same.
The wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. These are the characteristic features of our relation to God, as it takes shape on this side resurrection. Our relation to God is ungodly. We suppose that we know what we are saying when we say ‘God’. We assign to Him the highest place in our world: and in so doing we place Him fundamentally on one line with ourselves and with things. We assume that He needs something: and so we assume that we are able to arrange our relation to Him as we arrange our other relationships. We press ourselves into proximity with Him: and so, all unthinking, we make Him nigh unto ourselves. We allow ourselves an ordinary communication with Him, we permit ourselves to reckon with Him as though this were not extraordinary behavior on our part. We dare to deck ourselves out as His companions, patrons, advisers, and commissioners. We confound time with eternity. This is the ungodliness of our relation to God. And our relation to God is unrighteous. Secretly we are ourselves the masters in this relationship. We are not concerned with God, but with our own requirements, to which God must adjust Himself. Our arrogance demands that, in addition to everything else, some super-world should also be known and accessible to us. Our conduct calls for some deeper sanction, some approbation and remuneration from another world. Our well-regulated, pleasurable life longs for some hours of devotion, some prolongation into infinity. And so, when we set God upon the throne of the world, we mean by God ourselves. In ‘believing’ on Him, we justify, enjoy, and adore ourselves. Our devotion consists in a solemn affirmation of ourselves and of the world and in a pious setting aside of the contradiction. Under the banners of humility and emotion we rise in rebellion against God. We confound time with eternity. That is our unrighteousness.—Such is our relation to God apart from and without Christ, on this side resurrection, and before we are called to order. God Himself is not acknowledged as God and what is called ‘God’ is in fact Man. By living to ourselves, we serve the ‘No-God’ (Barth, 44, 1968).
I began this essay on revelation in Karl Barth’s early theology with an excerpt from his Epistle to the Romans on the wrath of God, because, in fact, the revelation of the wrath of God is, for Barth, precisely no revelation at all. This is the revelation of the No-God. To understand revelation in Barth’s theology it is first necessary to inquire as to what revelation is not, which will provide an answer to the question, “Who is the No-God?” and give us a starting point for a positive statement of what revelation is. This is necessary because it reflects the development of Barth’s theology of revelation, whose terrestrial beginnings would eventually become the very object of Barth’s heavenly assault. For Barth was not only reacting against the liberal theologians of the nineteenth century but was also at war with the liberal theologian within.
In the first section of this essay I will discuss the historical setting and the theological and philosophical climate out of which Barth’s theology emerged and against which it reacted, with a specific view to revelation. In so doing I will be answering the question, “Who is the No-God?” I will then discuss Barth’s theology in both negative and positive terms—the deconstruction of the No-God and the discovery of the God of the Bible as the basis of all revelation. Finally, I will end with Barth’s later developments in the Church Dogmatics, with a particular view to how the Church encounters revelation and what that encounter is.
On August 1, 1914, World War I broke out. Karl Barth was a twenty-eight year old pastor in Safenwil, Switzerland. After having received a theological education in Germany, Barth had made his way back to Switzerland to enter the pastorate. At this point in history, Germany was undergoing many ideological changes as modern philosophical and theological thought began to work itself out into political and social theory. Thus began the rise of German socialism that would eventuate that fateful day in 1914.
After a few years in the pastorate, Barth had become very politically minded. He found in his first couple years that the moralism, pietism and the “culture-affirming religiosity” that he had learned in Germany was not adequately addressing a people in social crisis (Dorrien, 32). While he maintained his theological basis in German theology, his sermons began to take a largely political form. This became especially true after the outbreak of the war. As a general statement, in a world of war politics govern common conversation and thus the thought life of a given society. So it was in Safenwil. So Barth formed his sermons to be relevant to his congregation and his world. Hence he wrote, “In 1914 the whole world was preoccupied with the outbreak of war. I felt obliged to let the war rage through all my sermons, until finally a woman came up to me and asked me for once to talk about something else” (Busch, 81, 1994). Though he largely complied, his sermons were still based primarily on social problems. As social problems continued to worsen, Barth’s theology and politics were becoming more and more inseparable. This would ultimately lead to a full embracement of religious socialism.
The Christian Social movement in Germany, led by such figures as Adolph Harnack and Wilhelm Hermann, both of whom had deeply impacted Barth especially during his educational years in Germany, was largely a conservative movement in political terms. This movement envisaged social change not through political reform, in which the Church had no business, but through individual morality and inward spirituality. This movement was principally born out of the two key figures that must be briefly noted in order to understand the theological premises on which German theological liberalism and pietism were based: (1) Albrecht Ritschl, whose theology was essentially a recapitulation to Kantian philosophy applied determinedly to the Christian religion (Gunton, 13).[1] For Ritschl theology was primarily associated with historical revelation and Christian ethics (Heron, 33). As regards revelation, Ritschl insisted upon “the positive and particular revelation of God in the historical person of Jesus. In doing so it tended to identify the content of that revelation directly with historically locatable phenomena.” The content of revelation thus became accessible to “any who cared to equip themselves with the relevant historical-critical tools and methods” (Webster, 40). Revelation as such remained shut off from the ordinary person of faith and left to the ivory towers of scholarship (nay, of Babel!). But undoubtedly the greatest influence on nineteenth century Protestant theology in general, and German theology in particular, was (2) Friedrich Schleiermacher. Even Ritschl, though markedly different from Schleiermacher in many ways, recognized Schleiermacher as his predecessor, particularly in terms of method. Of Schleiermacher’s influence Barth wrote in 1924:
Schleiermacher merits detailed historical consideration and study even if only because he was the one in whom the great struggle of Christianity…in whose light or shadow we still stand today, took place in a way which would still be memorable even if he were dead and his theological work had been transcended. None of his contemporaries…took up that struggle so comprehensively or with or with such concern, and none of the theologians of his age has anything like the same representative significance for what took place at that time. But Schleiermacher is not dead for us and his theological work has not been transcended. If anyone still speaks today of Protestant theology as though he were still among us, it is Schleiermacher. We study Paul and the reformers, but we see with the eyes of Schleiermacher and think along the same lines as he did (Barth, xiii, 1982).
The theological premise that Schleiermacher had established was that “religious experience [in general was] the generative ground of all theology” (Dorrien, 36) and that religion in particular was “rooted in immediate pre-reflexive feeling and intuition” (Schleiermacher, xi). As such, revelation arises “in the sphere of self-consciousness…The originality is…a perfectly ‘natural’ phenomenon…Indeed, every event and every object is potentially a locus of revelation in this sense. ‘Every finite thing…is a sign of the Infinite’” (Webster, 40). Thus the two most influential figures (arguably) of nineteenth century theology located revelation somewhere on the same plane of existence as man, whether within man or somewhere on the timeline of human history.
While Barth’s theology had been principally shaped in this cast, his life in Safenwil challenged the social indifference that seemed to result from these theological premises. This drove him to ask what the God of Christianity had to say to a world in crisis. He thus began seeing the Christian religion as a means for social change. Furthermore and finally, the labor situation of his congregation in Safenwil, who had no labor union to protect them from increasingly harsh working conditions and low wages, led to his officially joining the Swiss Religious Socialist movement, which sought to effect change in social structures and transform the social order. “Without a commitment to a kingdom-bringing social justice, Barth warned his congregation, their religion was nothing but a pack of lies” (Dorrien, 32-36). Though he was still grounded in the same theological principle of the individual’s religious experience as the basis of theology, his ties with German liberalism were beginning to disband. It was ultimately the start of The Great War which would prove to shake Barth’s theological position all the way to its foundations.
The beginning of the war was the (truest) beginning of the end of Barth’s acceptance of German liberalism.
One day in early August 1914 (August 1) stands out in my personal memory as a black day. Ninety-three German intellectuals impressed public opinion by their proclamation in support of the war policy Wilhelm II and his counselors. Among these intellectuals I discovered to my horror almost all of my theological teachers whom I had greatly venerated. In despair over what this indicated about the signs of the time I suddenly realized that I could not any longer follow either their ethics and dogmatics or their understanding of the Bible and of history. For me at least, 19th-century theology no longer held any future (Barth, 14, 1960).
Barth had thus begun seeing the godlessness (in the a literal sense of the word) that marked the theology he had imbibed. For if his theological teachers could support the war without abandoning their theologies, it therefore seemed a common evil must have been shared between the two. This was further confirmed, to be sure, by a rather symbolic event that occurred the same year: “Accidentally or not” Ernst Troeltsch, a respected systematic theologian and “leader of the then most modern school, gave up his chair in theology for one in philosophy” (Barth, 14, 1960). Barth wondered if Troeltsch’s official conversion from theology to philosophy was much of a conversion at all. Was it instead an inadvertent acknowledgment of what had become of theology all along? It was becoming questionable whether what had been called theology actually had much at all to do with its intended subject. Was theology anything more than what Feuerbach accused it of being: anthropology projected into a concept of the infinite (Barth, 520-22, 2002)? Barth’s foundations were shaken.
In later reflections Barth would recount the development of the theology from which he had defected. He had discovered that though there was much good intention in the heart of nineteenth century theology, there was equally as much naiveté as regards their presuppositions. In a word, what was an attempt to contextualize to the world ultimately became a form of syncretism with the world. The heart of theologians in the nineteenth century to make theology accessible to the world proved to be both its strength, recognizing the Christian mandate to be in the world, but ultimately also its downfall, not thoroughly enough safeguarding themselves from becoming of the world. In the effort to make God communicable to the world, on the world’s terms, “theology…went overboard” (Barth, 14, 1960). Theologians had lost their prophetic voice to culture by attempting to speak in a welcoming voice.[2] This openness led to devastating consequences. As theology, and therefore the Church, was preoccupied with its newly recognized mission, it hardly had time or energy left for in-house maintenance or construction. There was no fresh word for the Church in the nineteenth century, only a friendly word to the world. Furthermore, theology’s role in and loyalty to the Church had become displaced. Theology was fundamentally becoming apologetics.[3] In fact, many theologians spoke with contempt about the Church in its failures to reach out. This seemed to allow for a freedom to break away from certain theological premises which, since they had seemingly disregarded Christian mission, could be altogether dismissed. With the slate cleaned and eyes fixed to the world, attempts were begun to reconstruct Christian theology from certain modern world views, in order to engage the modern world. But this would require an overhaul in both thinking and speaking.
“How could the theologians establish and preserve the much-coveted contact with the contemporary world if they did not speak from within one of the current philosophies and world views?” (Barth, 20, 1960), asked Barth. In other words, the theologians had to adopt a new hermeneutical lens, for both the Bible and the world, which affirmed certain modern philosophical premises. The general presupposition (or first principle) affirmed in modern philosophy was individual self-consciousness.[4] This was the ground of epistemology out of which grew a lush field of philosophies to which the Church would now attempt to make its God and faith accessible. The result was that faith became
the realization of one form of man’s spiritual life and self-awareness…[which] appeared to be a windowless monad, dependent on human feelings, knowledge, and will…, self nurturing, self-governing, and self-sufficient. A capacity for the infinite within the finite, faith had no ground, object, or content other than itself. It had no vis-à-vis. Faith as the Christian’s commerce with God could first and last be only the Christian’s commerce with himself (Barth, 26, 1960).
Faith became entirely self-referential. Any word spoken of God was, in essence, a word spoken of man. Religion had tragically realized Feuerbach’s accusation. It was little more than man writ large (Feuerbach).
Without God as its final object, the God who holds humanity to account, and without recognition of his sovereignty over world history, theology found its beginning and end in the world below. Theology’s word to the world was not God’s word to man but man’s word to man. So as world events and philosophies and politics changed, instead of theology offering a prophetic critique it tended to find ways to gives to give support. Theology had lost its prophetic voice and had become a mimicker of whichever theory or philosophy or movement proved strongest (Barth, 27, 1960). It had become a Christian shaped mirror of the world.
August 1, 1914, almost all of Barth’s theological teachers signed the document in support of the war policy of Wilhelm II. How had this happened? How had the “Church subscribed to political conservatism in the first half of the century and in the second half to the preservation of the liberal bourgeoisie, the growing nationalism and militarism!”? Not with “ill will; but theologically the ship was without a rudder” (Barth, 28, 1960). The slippery slope of rash contextualization led to a fall into the ravages of war. What began with an affirmation of, above all, the individual’s religious experience led to an affirmation of the “religious war experience, [which was] employed as a sacralizing warrant for German militarism” (Dorrien, 37). Barth had discovered that since man began with himself as the basis for theology, there he would end as well. And to his horror, as he watched the world in war lusting after and executing its own self-destruction, he had discovered the identity of the No-God. It was man. He then realized that the revelation of the wrath of God was precisely no revelation of God at all. It was nothing more than God giving man over to the No-God, to himself.
“Wherefore God gave them up.” The confusion avenges itself and becomes its own punishment. The forgetting of the true God is already itself the breaking loose of His wrath against those who forget Him. The enterprise of setting up the ‘No-God’ is avenged by its success (Barth, 51, 1968).
Disillusioned, Barth thus began a search for new foundations.
“His first attempt to find a new theological basis lurched in various directions.” He was influenced by a number of figures: “Kutter’s witness to the ‘living God’…the younger Blumhardt’s spirituality…[He] read ‘huge amounts of Dostoevsky’..[Immanuel] Kant…Plato…[Soren] Keirkegaard…[and] Franz Overbeck” (Dorrien, 42). Barth was particularly impacted during this time by a meeting he had with Christoph Blumhardt, who directed his focus away from the whimsicalness of world centered theology and toward a theology whose center and stability had its basis in the transcendent God. Of Blumhardt he wrote,
He simply passes over dogmatic and liberal theologians, those interested in religious morality and us socialists. He is friendly but quite uninvolved. He does not contradict anyone, and no one needs to feel rejected, but at the same time he does not agree with anyone’s views…I think that he would also have all sorts of things to say about the conflicts and problems which now affect us. But he does not want to say it; it is not important enough, because other things are more important to him (Busch, 85, 1994).
Barth saw in Blumhardt something that was not based on the constant crises of change that had taken over theology. This gave him an entirely different perspective on the war. He wrote, “It is not the war that disturbs our peace. The war is not even the cause of our unrest. It has merely brought to light the fact that our lives are all based on unrest. And where there is unrest there can be no peace. But God is peace. And where there is no peace, there is no God—we do without him” (Busch, 85, 1994). Theology of God (theology proper), Barth was beginning to understand, if it is truly of God, will be a source of peace and tranquility in a world of chaos and unrest. Rather than God through theology having to give an answer to the world in turmoil, the world as such would have to give an answer to the God of peace. As for social crises and the war itself, Barth was beginning to rise above what seemed to be the futility of hasty solutions of human activity and started finding unprecedented hope in the sovereignty of God and the promise of restoration based on God’s activity. Blumhardt had thus reoriented Barth’s perspective by pointing him to the sovereign God which bred a new confidence in the Christian eschatological hope (Busch, 87, 1994).
Throughout the next year Barth continued on this trajectory. While the outbreak of war inaugurated his decisive revolt against German liberalism, his ties with religious socialism came loose much more slowly. Though he recognized that socialism was limited insofar as it was a human attempt to fix the problem that was ultimately humanity itself, he felt that it was the best option at the time. However, as he began to develop a new theological foundation, which emphasized hope in God and God’s activity, his hope in politics began to change. As a pastor, his sermons had for so long been based on addressing a world and a people in crisis; they thus began with human problems and ended with human answers. But Barth was finding that his preaching was symptomatic of a theology that was not grounded in God’s peace and the Christian eschatological hope. Over the next few years as Barth was focusing his attention on shope in the sovereign God, his optimism toward any human attempts at significant structural change were dissolving. By 1916, two years after the outbreak of the war, he was elected to be the president of a conference of Religious Socialists but declined. Soon after Barth sent a review of Blumhardt’s House Prayers to Leonhard Ragaz, one of the leaders of the conference and a man who had been a formative influence with regard to Barth’s socialists views, to be put in a magazine of which he was editor. Barth had titled the review, “’Wait for the Kingdom of God’ (with the last words in italics!)” (Busch, 92, 1994). This would mark a decisive severing of his ties with religious socialism. He wrote, “Our dialectic has reached a dead end, and if we want to be healthy and strong we must begin all over again, not with our own actions, but quietly ‘waiting’ for God’s action.” Of his relationship with Ragaz Barth wrote, “Ragaz and I roared past one another like two express trains: he went out of the church, I went in” (Busch, 92, 1994). Barth’s eyes to the world were now sharply focused on the Church.
During these two years and in light of all his changes in thought, Barth began asking himself, “What have I to preach?” And it was “the problems associated with preaching [that] proved to illuminate the wider problem of how God is known” (Busch, 89, 1994). His questions of preaching led him to the deeper questions of what can be known of God and how. After having turned back to academic theology for a time (noted above), Barth was still unsatisfied. His search for God in the writings of men proved to be found in want. However, Barth’s perspective had already begun to shift foundations from his conversation with Blumhardt. It was during a holiday retreat with his closest companion during this time, Eduard Thurneysen, that Barth’s perspective would be finally shift not only to a wholly new foundation, but to a seemingly wholly other world. He wrote, “It was Thurneysen who whispered the key phrase to me, half aloud, while we were alone together: ‘What we need for preaching, instruction and pastoral care is a ‘wholly other’ theological foundation’” (Busch, 97, 1994). And with this, Barth resorted to discover his foundation for the knowledge of God in a much more obvious source:
We tried to learn our theological ABC all over again, beginning by reading and interpreting the writing of the Old and New Testaments, more thoughtfully than before. And lo and behold, they began to speak to us—but not as we thought we must have heard them in the school of what was then ‘modern theology’. They sounded very different on the morning after the day on which Thurneysen had whispered that phrase to me (Busch, 97, 1994).
Thus began his project to discover the God of the Bible. He turned his attention to Romans and began taking notes which were originally intended for only himself and a few companions. However, this began what would ultimately become the watershed for modern theology as we know it. Over the course of the next year (from July 1916 to March 1917) Barth had only made it through chapter 4. In February of 1917 Barth gave his first address since his biblical project had begun entitled, “The Strange New World within the Bible.” In it we find the foundations being born for Barth’s theology of Revelation (Busch, 101, 1994).
For two centuries the Bible had been put through a gamut of hermeneutical lenses, from the hermeneutic of suspicion which characterized much of the historical criticism of the eighteenth century that was carried into the nineteenth century by Ritschl, and through the hermeneutics of modern philosophy’s array of religious self-expressions, as it were, whether morality, romanticism, whatever. By contrast, Barth attempted to approach the text on its own terms, allowing the Bible itself to form a methodology for reading the Bible. In so doing, what he discovered was a “Strange New World within the Bible.” In all the stories of history he discovered little to no hope for true historical recovery, which was the entire project of historical criticism. Rather, these stories were suggestive of something that “lies behind” (Barth, 29-32, 1957). There value was not in the possibility of proof or recovery, but in what is suggested granting their truth. And again, what is there to be offered as regards a clear system of morality in a book that endorses war in one part and condemns it in the next; where the men who—lead God’s chosen out of slavery, who rule as God’s appointed king, who become the greatest teller of God’s good news—are all murderers! And in response to the modern emphasis on individual experience and self-consciousness, Barth discovers nothing of man’s own making or of his self-validation or of self-realization, but discovers instead something “wholly other.” “Time and again the Bible gives us the impression that it contains no instructions, counsels, or examples whatsoever, either for individuals or for nations and governments; and the impression is correct. It offers us not at all what we first seek in it. Once more we stand before this ‘other’ new world which begins in the Bible. In it the chief consideration is not the doings of man but the doings of God” (Barth, 39, 1957).
Barth’s study through Romans began consuming all of his time as he was rethinking all his opinions and positions in light of Paul’s magnum opus.
It served as a focal point for all his concerns: philosophical idealism, romanticism, religious socialism, biblical thought, the experience of the war are all caught up with Paul’s own words to drive home the fact that the world of man is corrupted by sin and that his attempts to assert himself without God, even by religion or piety, are useless. Salvation comes only as God’s gift, and his kingdom must break into the present age before man can play his part in bringing about its fulfillment (Bowden, 30).
His notes, which he called “copy-book exercises”, were eventually published, with only marginal success initially. But as Barth continued to give public addresses his name began to spread. A German publishing firm, Kaiser Verlag, soon took interest in his Epistle to the Romans, which led to a second edition, which would become “the most powerful piece of theological writing of the twentieth century” (Bowden, 31). And again, Catholic theologian Karl Adam said of Romans, “It fell like a bombshell on the playground of the theologians” (Moody, 24). And one particular target of this “bombshell” was what had become an anthropologically centered theology of revelation.
In the first five pages of his introduction, commenting on Paul’s prologue, Barth had relentlessly attacked modern concepts of revelation as something that could be discovered through historical-critical analysis (Ritschl) or through the individual’s “immediate pre-reflexive feeling and intuition” (Schleiermacher). Barth insists, rather, that there is a great gulf between the world of God and the world of man. Against the assumption of a historical recovery of revelation he writes,
The effulgence, or, rather, the crater made at the percussion point of an exploding shell, the void by which the point on the line of intersection [that is, where the infinite touches the finite] makes itself known in the concrete world of history, is not—even though it be named the Life of Jesus—that other world which touches our world in Him. Insofar as our world is touched in Jesus by the other world, it ceases to be capable of direct observation as history, time, or thing (Barth, 29, 1968).
And against the assumption of the immediate experience of the God within us as revelation, he writes,
“Even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer.” What He was, He is. But what He is underlies what He was. There is here no merging or fusion of God and man, no exaltation of humanity to divinity, no overflowing of God into human nature.
Barth’s working definition of revelation made one thing clear: if revelation occurred it happened by way of encounter—the Wholly Other crashing into the human subject. It was not a volcano erupting from the depths of the earth’s core; it was an asteroid crashing into the earth’s crust, shaking it to its core. Humanity had no innate “organ or capacity for God, and…this lack is not partial but total” (Webster, 42). God’s revelation thus required God’s initiated activity. The foundation that had been set for the knowledge of God coming through historical recovery or the experience of God as a presumed predicate to mere self-forgetfulness[5] was being decisively dismantled. A distinction was being drawn between revelation as “some general knowledge of God and man…known before hand, known a priori…and…revelation [as]…a posteriori” (Barth, 4, 1970). In other words, the revelation of God was necessarily the inbreaking of God, the interruption of God into an otherwise godless existence.
While The Epistle to the Romans laid the groundwork for Barth’s theology of revelation, it does not accurately reflect Barth’s later views. While he kept ever before him the “infinite qualitative distinction between God and man” (Barth, 355, 1968; cf. Kierkegaard), he realized that in going so far to stress the transcendence of God, he had undermined any true hope for God’s immanence. Although he had talked about revelation in Romans, the God of this revelation was portrayed in almost dualistic terms. While Barth would still hold that the possibility of knowing or experiencing God required the activity and very presence of God himself, he would later make an effort to show that God was not entirely random and whimsical in the way he chooses to reveal himself. His later work reflects his attempt to show how the Wholly Other God makes himself known in a somewhat regular (for lack of a better word—Barth would never say this!) fashion, so that there were certain means of engagement through which one could approach God and anticipate revelation.
While The Epistle to the Romans laid the groundwork for Barth’s theology of revelation, it does not accurately reflect Barth’s later views. While he kept ever before him the “infinite qualitative distinction between God and man” (Barth, 355, 1968; cf. Kierkegaard), he realized that in going so far to stress the transcendence of God, he had undermined any true hope for God’s immanence. Although he had talked about revelation in Romans, the God of this revelation was portrayed in almost dualistic terms. While Barth would still hold that the possibility of knowing or experiencing God required the activity and very presence of God himself, he would later make an effort to show that God was not entirely random and whimsical in the way he chooses to reveal himself. His later work reflects his attempt to show how the Wholly Other God makes himself known in a somewhat regular (for lack of a better word—Barth would never say this!) fashion, so that there were certain means of engagement through which one could approach God and anticipate revelation.
The first means of engagement is the Word of God preached (or proclaimed). The proclaimed word must be understood in light of its presupposition, which suggests that proclamation must ever and again become proclamation (Barth, 88, 1975). In other words, proclamation is not merely the transmission of words communicated about God but the Word of God itself in transmission, which presupposes God’s activity. Barth explains this in four points which he describes as four concentric circles starting with the outermost circle.
First, “The Word of God is the commission upon whose givenness proclamation must rest if it is to be real proclamation” (Barth, 89, 1975). In this point Barth emphasizes that the Word of God can be assumed to be present in proclamation only insofar as proclamation is a response to God’s positive command. Proclamation can never be the transmission of the Word of God if it is a response to a human motivation, to a human “craving” to know and understand God. God’s positive command to the Church, however, predicates God’s activity upon compliance. Thus, given the fact of the command to proclaim the Word of God, we can expect that the Word of God is present in our proclamation insofar as our response is to God. And as such proclamation, and thus what is revealed in proclamation, is based on “God’s own direction, which fundamentally transcends all human causation, which cannot, then, be put on a human basis, but which simply takes place, and has to be acknowledged, as a fact” (Barth, 90, 1975).
Second, “The Word of God is the theme which must be given to proclamation as such if it is to be real proclamation” (Barth, 91, 1975). Barth discusses here the stuff of proclamation. Is “proclamation of something…that belongs to the sphere of objects of human apprehension…of [either] outer and [or] inner perception.” Barth concedes that all objects are perceived through an outer experience (posteriori) or an inner thought (a priori) (Barth here appealing to Kant’s epistemology) and to have proclamation as an object we must have it thus. But left to these categories proclamation could be reduced to metaphysics or psychology, and as such “we could take charge of it, and indeed would have to do so.” To this Barth suggests that the Word of God is not an object of human perception but only becomes an object of human perception in the event of (true) proclamation. It becomes an object of human perception precisely and only because God has chosen to make himself known to human perception, which apprehends knowledge only through the “unavoidable medium of perceptual objectivity.” Although the Word of God becomes an object in the event of proclamation, it does not however remain an object “which can…be our possession, to which we can…point back as to a datum” (contra Ritschl). Thus the second concentric circle of the Word of God revealed in proclamation means “human talk about God on the basis of the self-objectification of God, which is not just there, which cannot be predicted, which does not fit into any plan, which is real only in the freedom of His grace, and in virtue of which He wills at specific times to be the object of his talk, and is so according to his good pleasure” (Barth, 92, 1975).[6]
Third, “The Word of God is the judgment in virtue of which alone proclamation can be real proclamation.” Here Barth responds to the question of how to validate whether proclamation is true and with what criteria such a judgment can be made. Given its origin and unrecoverability, it cannot be validated according to the same criteria as ordinary human speech. Its uniqueness requires something of common essence to serve as its judge. Hence the only criterion that can judge the truth of proclamation of the Word of God is the Word of God. For “we cannot ‘handle’ this criterion. It is the criterion which handles itself and is in no other hands” (Barth, 93, 1975). The Word of God is thus self-authenticating. Real proclamation is the Word of God when it is judged to be true by God Himself, because only God can judge rightly whether what is proclaimed is true with reference to “the proclaimed object and the proclaiming subject.”
And fourth, “only here do we make the decisive point—the Word of God is the event itself in which proclamation becomes real proclamation.” The last three statements were described as three concentric circles closing in on this one central point without which the surrounding circles would be empty. The first three points, to be sure, are predicated on this fourth point, namely that real proclamation occurs “when proclamation is for us not just human willing and doing characterized in some way but also and primarily and decisively God’s own act, when human talk about God is for us not just that, but also and primarily and decisively God’s own speech.” This does not dissolve human willing and doing, much in the same way, Barth suggests, that Christ’s divinity did not dissolve his humanity. Rather, as God is the creator and author of human speech, He is therefore the Subject of human proclamation, even in cooperation with human willing and doing. And thus,
Real proclamation means the Word of God preached. Only now is it clear that ‘preached’ belongs to the predicate, and to what degree. The Word of God preached means in this fourth and innermost circle man’s talk about God in which and through which God speaks about Himself (Barth, 95, 1975).
The second means of engagement is the Word of God written. What is the basis of the willing and doing of the Church in proclamation? As a general statement, “Church proclamation must be ventured in recollection of past revelation and in expectation of coming revelation…we speak of an actualized proclamation, of a Word of God preached in the Church, on the basis that God’s Word has already been spoken, that revelation has already taken place” (Barth, 99, 1975). This is not merely a process involving the Church looking back on its own history, looking back on something that essentially belongs to the past, because revelation always and only belongs to God’s activity, which, though it intersects space and time, does so distinctly as the infinite and eternal. To look for past revelation in this way is to attempt to draw water from an empty canal. What is seen in the Bible is a crater from a bolt of lightning, not lightning itself. And as such it is irretrievable. Hence,
[the Church’s] return to its own being on the basis of which alone it may actually venture its proclamation does indeed mean for it a return to its own being, but to its self-transcendent being, to Jesus Christ as the heavenly Head to whom it, the earthly body, is attached as such, but in relation to whom it is also distinct as such, who has the Church within Himself but whom the Church does not have within itself, between whom and it there is no reversible or alternating relation (Barth, 100, 1975).
The concrete expression of this distinction between and superiority of Christ over his Church is the Holy Scripture. With the Church’s acknowledgment of the Canon—the measuring rod or standard—as its ground of proclamation, it acknowledges that its proclamation is not self-referential but grounded in the Word of God. As such, the Word of God written is the very Word of God that is proclaimed. The written Word is distinct from the Church and stands over against the Church much in the same way as Christ is distinct from and stands over against the Church. This grounds proclamation in “something that is concretely external” and, in fact, constitutes the very ground, not only of proclamation, but of the Church itself. The Church itself stands on the witness of the prophets and apostles, the content of which is God’s Word to and about the Church. And as such, Holy Scripture is not primarily an historical document but a “Church document, written proclamation” (Barth, 102, 1975).
Though present-day proclamation of Holy Scripture presupposes continuity, if the former is authentic it will maintain a certain degree of discontinuity. This distinction is necessary inasmuch as Holy Scripture is superior to proclamation. This distinction in present-day proclamation is necessary if indeed God has a word to the present-day, that is, if the Word of God is present today. This constitutes the apostolic succession of the Church, which “replaces [the prophets’ and apostles’ office of proclamation] only as and to the extent that it conforms to it. It must mean that the Church always admits the free power of their proclamation over it” (Barth, 105, 1975).[7] And thus the Church’s engagement with Holy Scripture is not dialogue with itself; rather, the Holy Scripture is an address to the Church (Barth, 106, 1975).
As to the question of what constitutes the Bible as the Canon: “The Bible constitutes itself [as] the Canon” (Barth, 107, 1975). It is the content of the Bible in its audacious claim to be a witness to “Immanuel, with us sinners” that, if true, can and must be the only source of its validation. There can be no historical or rational proofs to argue for the Canon as the Bible, because if it is true in its claim of the recollection of the past and expectation of the future revelation of God, then the content of its claim, which does not exist as a this-worldly recoverable or deducible object, cannot be ascertained but only hoped for. The Church must therefore receive the Bible as the Canon in faith and must receive its content in faith. Faith is the threshold through which humanity approaches the revelation of God, in either recollection or expectation thereof.
The revelation of the Word of God expressed in proclamation and in the Canon are to be understood in the same way—here lies the continuity between the two— insofar as they are understood as “a human word which has God’s commission to us behind it, a human word to which God has given Himself as object, a human word which is recognized and accepted by God as good, a human word in which God’s own address to us is an event” (Barth, 109, 1975). The event is itself the point of intersection; it is the revelation to which the written and spoken Word of God bear witness. It is the Word of God, in its rawest sense, revealed.
The third means of engagement is, in fact, no means at all. It is direct engagement. It is the Word of God revealed. The Bible is God’s Word as it bears witness to past revelation and proclamation is God’s Word as it promises future revelation, insofar as they really accomplish bearing witness to and promising as such. Since proclamation relies entirely on the attestation in the Bible, “the decisive relation of the Church to revelation is its attestation by the Bible. Its attestation!” (Barth, 111, 1975). The Bible is itself distinct from past revelation in its attestation. However,
When the Canon, the staff which commands and sets moving and points the way, is moved by a living stretched-out hand, just as the water was moved in the Pool of Bethesda that it might thereby become a means of healing, then it bears witness, and by this act of witness it establishes the relation of the Church to revelation, and therewith establishes the Church itself as the true Church, and therewith its proclamation as true proclamation. By its witness!
Thus the witness is always pointed away from itself to the very agent of revelation. It is the lame man coming out of the waters pointing to the invisible hand.
The Bible is not itself to be understood as revelation but as a witness to revelation. This is precisely what gives the biblical witness authority—“that he claims no authority for himself, that his witness amounts to letting that other itself be its own authority” (Barth, 112, 1975). The Bible is itself subordinate to revelation in the way that a painting is subordinate to the event it portrays. It cannot be therefore presupposed that encountering the Bible is the same as encountering the revelation of God. If that were true, there would be no distinction. And as such the Bible is not the Word of God as an objective fact, but rather it becomes the Word of God as an event. Barth writes,
[It becomes the Word of God] when and where the biblical world comes into play as a word of witness, when and where John’s finger does not point in vain but really indicates, when and where we are enabled by means of his word to see and hear what he saw and heard. Thus in the event of God’s Word [and only as such] revelation and the Bible are indeed one, and literally so (Barth, 113, 1975).
Revelation must be distinguished from “even the best and most faithful account of it,” because there is no direct analogy of the event of revelation. The Bible is thus one of three axis points in the event of revelation, insofar as it is, in some way, albeit subject to God’s willing, responsible for bringing the reading and listening subject and the object of its testimony into encounter.
The encounter becomes identifiable, that is, the One who is encountered is identifiable because the content of Holy Scripture identifies Him to whom it testifies—Jesus Christ, God with us. The prophets expected his coming, as God willed and revealed this expectation, and the apostles recollected his coming in the same way. The entire Bible is thus a witness to the happening of the coming of God into human history.[8] But it also attests to the fact that this event is not left on the same plane of nonexistence as all other events, for all other events are understood in relation to this one event, the event, in which the absolute became relative, albeit only in form, thus putting himself over against all that is in flux and becoming the once-for-all revelation of the eternal and infinite God in Jesus Christ:
This ‘God with us’ has happened. Yet it has not happened as other parts of this history usually happen. It does not need to be continued or completed. It does not point beyond itself or merely strive after a distant goal. It is incapable of…any addition or subtraction. Its form cannot be changed. It has happened as self-moved being in the stream of becoming. It has happened as completed event, fulfilled time, in the sea of the incomplete and changeable and self-changing (Barth, 116, 1975).
Finally, “According to all that has been said revelation is originally and directly what the Bible and Church proclamation are derivatively and indirectly, i.e., God’s Word” (Barth, 117, 1975), and it must continually become God’s Word in and through these means, never taken for granted as some static, objective, comprehendible commodity. What is God’s Word really is God’s Word inasmuch as only He can speak it. Revelation cannot be apprehended and obtained by virtue of human effort. Thus revelation presupposes God’s freedom. “The reference is to the freedom of God’s Word. Ubi et quando visum est Deo (‘When and if revelation is God’), not intrinsically but in virtue of the divine decision taken ever and anon in the Bible and proclamation as the free God uses them” (Barth, 117, 1975). Revelation, by any means and in itself, is thus predicated on the real living and active and utterly free and gracious God, who chooses to reveal himself as Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. As such, the revelation of God is one and the same as reconciliation with God, precisely because it is God’s once-for-all revelation of Jesus Christ. Revelation understood as God’s free initiative “does not differ from the person of Jesus Christ nor from the reconciliation accomplished in Him. To say revelation is to say ‘The Word became flesh’” (Barth, 119, 1975). And again,
This is what revelation means, this is its content and dynamic: Reconciliation has been made and accomplished. Reconciliation is not a truth which revelation makes known to us; reconciliation is the truth of God Himself who grants Himself freely to us in His revelation. God, who is the mighty, holy, and eternal God, gave Himself to us, who are so impotent, so unholy, and mortal. Revelation is reconciliation, as certainly as it is God Himself: God with us; God beside us, and chiefly and decisively, God for us (Barth, 17, 1936).
Barth began his project with an assault on the god who had been presumed as a predicate to human consciousness and an object of human recovery. He had discovered that this god was nothing more than an expression of human depravity. This god was, in fact, the No-God. Humanity was hopelessly alone in its religion. Barth’s project ended, however, with the discovery that God had not left us alone, that the revelation of Jesus Christ was precisely the reversal of human depravity, God with us. And because this was and only could be God’s gracious and free act, Barth had discovered nothing other than God for us.
Works Cited
Barth, Karl. God in Action Theological Addresses. New York: Wipf & Stock, 2005. Print.
---. Protestant theology in the nineteenth century its background and history. Grand Rapids, Mich: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2002. Print.
---. The Doctrine of the Word of God (Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, pt. 1). Trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975. Print.
---. The Doctrine of the Word of God (Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, pt. 2). Trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight. New York: T. & T. Clark, 1956. Print.
---. The Epistle to the Romans. Trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns. Trans from 6th ed. ed. New York: Oxford, 1968. Print.
---. The Humanity of God. John Knox, 1960. Print.
---. The Theology of Schleiermacher: lectures at Göttingen, winter semester of 1923/24. Ed. Dietrich Ritschl. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 1982. Print.
---. The Word of God & the Word of Man. Trans. Douglas Horton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957. Print.
Becker, Carl L. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (The Storrs Lectures Series). New York: Yale UP, 1959. Print.
Blackburn, Simon. Think: a compelling introduction to philosophy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.
Bowden, John. Karl Barth: Theologian. London: SCM, 1983. Print.
Busch, Eberhard. Barth. Nashville: Abingdon, 2008. Print.
---. Karl Barth his life from letters and autobiographical texts. Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1994. Print.
---. The Great Passion An Introduction to Karl Barth's Theology. Boston: Wm. B. Eerdmans Company, 2004. Print.
Dorrien, Gary. The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology Theology Without Weapons. New York: Westminster John Knox, 1999. Print.
Gunton, Colin E. The Barth Lectures. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2007. Print.
Heron, Alasdair I. C. Century of Protestant theology. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980. Print.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Trans. Richard Crouter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.
Webster, John. The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge Companions to Religion). New York: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.
[1] Immanuel Kant was considered the “climax of the Enlightenment.” With regard the Christian faith, Kant’s system reduced Christianity to a “purely rational ethic…His view of Jesus, or his acceptance of Jesus is subject to individual verification by philosophical argument” (Gunton, 12-13). For Kant, Christianity was only useful insofar as it had an ethical end. Prayer and sacrament and piety that were not working toward explicitly moral ends were mere superstition and therefore practically useless. More generally, Kant was attempting to reconcile empiricism and rationalism to ground epistemology in a phenomenological synthesis of a priori and posteriori knowledge. This is worth noting as we looking further into revelation, since revelation deals largely with the knowledge of God.
[2] The precedent had been set by Schleiermacher whose theological career began decisively with his book On Religion: Speeches to it Cultured Despisers, which was ultimately written as an apologetic to the educated romanticists who had, in a sense, become too sophisticated for the religious life. Schleiermacher’s approach was not to inform them of the God of the Bible, but to help them become aware of the God within themselves. Hence, the last line of his book reads: “In each [person], the holy remains secret and hidden from the profane. Let them gnaw at the shell as they may, but do not prevent us from worshiping the God that is within you” (Schleiermacher, 124). Of Schleiermacher Barth would ultimately admit: “He was unmasked. In a decisive way all the theology expressed in the manifesto [above] and everything that followed it…proved to be founded and governed by him” (Busch, 82, 1994).
[3] Again, of Schleiermacher’s On Religion Barth wrote, “At attempt to persuade, to convince, to win over, to defend, to commend, to achieve agreement—this, then, is what the Speeches are. But the agreement concerns the value of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, as a value of life which is not just possible but necessary alongside, no, above all others, which is even demanded by them, which is more or less latently present already, and which only needs to be recognized and set in motion. The situation into which Schleiermacher enters with his first step as a theologian is that of apologetics” (Barth, 245, 1982).
[4] This foundation had been laid by Renee Descartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, who attempted to discover an irreducible principle of certainty as a premise for epistemology, and ultimately concluded with his famous Cogito, ergo sum. Though there was not general agreement over the implications of this conclusion, there was a general acceptance of it as a presupposition (save a few who asserted that thinking did not actually prove individual self-consciousness, but self-consciousness alone, the subject of which could not be ascertained) (Blackburn, 15-48, 1999 ). In fact, Barth would eventually attack this presupposition directly in his chapter entitled “Revelation” in The Humanity of God. The very last line of the chapter reads, “This is revelation: the event of God’s sovereign initiative. That it is an event, we are told by the biblical witnesses. If they are right in what they report, then it is indeed the event of all events. Descartes is wrong, then, when he says: Cogito, ergo sum. For by the reason of this revelation, we are less certain of our own existence than of God’s existence for us” (Barth, 19, 1936).
[5] This was another way Schleiermacher talked about the experience of God, suggesting by peeling away the layers of the self that one would discover the infinite: “Detach all that is not yourself, always proceed with ever-sharper sense, and the more you fade from yourself, the clearer will the universe stands forth before you, the more splendidly will you be recompensed for the horror of self-annihilation through the feeling of the infinite in you” (Schleiermacher, 69).
[6] The self-objectification of God must be understood as what is perceived, that is, revelation as it is received—revelation is always received! God Himself does not become an object amidst the world of objects but is perceived as object by human faculties in the event of revelation. This is why we must not attempt to absolutize anything as revelation. The helpless prison of the ego receives everything as object, nothing as I, but indeed revelation is precisely an encounter with I AM. What can be derived and discussed out of any such encounter is subsidiary to the encounter itself, of which nothing can adequately be said.
[7] On this basis Barth would reject the Roman-Catholic notion of apostolic succession through ecclesial tradition (cf. Barth, 106, 1975).
[8] Noteworthy is the fact that the Church bears up the same witness as the prophets and apostles, as we expect his coming, as well as the apostles, as we expect his future coming.
