God In Action. Karl Barth
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His truth. Before His face, evasion, either to the right or to the left, is impossible. In His presence there is no room left for choice, but only for decision, and always and only for decision.
3. Knowledge of revelation may be surrounded and accompanied by a rich variety of human fate. It may bring with it the profoundest external and inward experiences and call forth heroic deeds in a man. It may lift to mountain tops of human joy and plunge into an abyss of human sorrow. For revelation concerns itself with man, and every one of these things is a part of human life. But there remains—no, in the knowledge of revelation alone there emerges and comes to the surface the world-wide difference existing between, and separating, God and man.
It is man in his totality whom God meets in His revelation. They who would mix and confuse God and man, either in understanding man to be himself God or in looking upon God as the profoundest part of man’s nature or as man’s highest ideal, certainly never have seen that battlefield, nor have they heard the report from the battlefield of prophets and apostles. He who understands the meeting of God and man which takes place in revelation to be a union or fusion of these two principals of revelation, must be very much of a stranger in our world, a very untroubled spectator of our troubled affairs; or he must be passionately enamored with his own fate, activity, and suffering, and he must have heard little or nothing of the action of the opponent who confronts in his sovereign superiority man’s fate and existence. There is not another moment in time, not another place in all the world, which offers less opportunity for the temptation of mixing and fusing man and God than where God and man really find each other: in God’s revelation.
4. Knowledge of revelation can and must mean, then, a knowledge of the far away, strange, and holy God. It prohibits the useless and dangerous thought that, in meeting God, man can appear and cooperate as God’s partner, as if he were filled and endowed with a capacity and good will for God. Knowledge of revelation means always an acknowledgement of the miracle by reason of which this meeting takes place. Their meeting is acknowledged to be occasioned by God’s grace, mercy, and condescension. These very words, however, distinctly affirm revelation to be a real relation between God and man, a relation the foundation of which is laid in Him from whom it possesses and derives its strength and permanence. It means that it is not founded on the ambiguous truth of our human nature, reason, or love. It is founded, however, on the free decision of the eternal and unchangeable God. The man to whom this relation still persists to be a question, or the man who would dare to deny it, would not have before his eyes God’s attack, divine action. Knowledge of revelation does not mean an abstract knowledge of a God confronting an abstract man. Rather, it is a concrete knowledge of the God who has sought man and meets him in his concrete situation and finds him there. Revelation is a concrete knowledge of God and man in the event brought about by the initiative of a sovereign God. This is what constitutes the glory of God: where the infinite difference between God and man becomes manifest, there indeed it becomes manifest also that man belongs to God not because he is capable of God, not because he has sought and found him, but because it is God’s gracious will to make man His own.
We have spoken of revelation. We could not possibly speak of it without anticipating the decisive factors in the problem of the nature and content of revelation. Why that certitude? Why that singularity (Einmaligkeit)? Why the unheard-of separation and relation between God and man which revelation effects? For the reason that revelation—that which came to prophets and apostles as revelation—is nothing less than God Himself. For this reason it is a mystery, i.e., a reality the possibility of which resides absolutely within itself; and therefore, also, we shall never, no, not in all eternity, be able to understand, derive, and substantiate it except out of itself. God is of and through Himself. We, likewise, are able to meditate on revelation only if our thinking begins with revelation when it has spoken for itself. And, therefore, it is authority, i.e., it is a truth which cannot be measured by the rule of any other truth beside it, however profound and valid that truth may appear to be. Rather, it is a truth which decides, and continues to decide what may be true. It is a truth then with whose acknowledgment every truth must make its beginning; and without its acknowledgment even profoundest truth is deception and a lie. And for the reason that revelation is God Himself, it is the court of last appeal for man—grace to him who accepts its verdict of condemnation as being God’s right, condemnation to him who will not receive this grace, but who asserts, and insists upon, his rights as a man in opposition to it.
Because revelation is God Himself! Twice the Christian Church was compelled to contend for the victory of this knowledge. The first time it was in the fourth century when the doctrine of the Trinity was at stake, i.e., the acknowledgment of the essential deity of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. In consummating this acknowledgment in a dogma, the Church gave expression to this: exactly in believing revelation, the Church believes God Himself; and she believes God Himself by believing revelation. This is what the Subordination and Modalist antitrinitarians of every age have never understood and never will understand. It was well and necessary that the Church did not permit itself to be led into error by their arguments.
The second battle for this same truth was fought in the sixteenth century, when the Reformation doctrine of free grace was at stake. The reformers were concerned about a right understanding of the justification of the sinner. They contended that it was an act in which the gift which is bestowed on the sinner is identical with the Giver of the gift, with His feelings, disposition, and dealings with that man, with the deed of God in which He gives and grants Himself freely to us: Immanuel. Jesus Christ is and remains our only justification; therefore, it can be ours only by faith in Him. This is what medieval Roman Catholicism did not yet understand and what modernistic Protestantism of every hue and shade proceeded and persists to forget. The Reformation doctrine, in its Lutheran as well as in its Calvinistic form, says with the same simplicity as did the Council of Nicæa: God Himself is the content of His revelation.
It is quite possible that the battle has entered its third stage today. Throughout the world, the Church is concerned today with the problem of the secularization of the modern man. It would perhaps be more profitable if the Church were at least to begin to become concerned with the problem of its own secularization. Secularism surely reigns where interest in divine revelation has been lost or bartered away for the interests of man. Is it unjust to say that knowledge of divine revelation has been forgotten where revelation is taken to be a change, an improvement, a perhaps very arbitrarily devised changed and improvement of man? Where it has been forgotton that revelation is God Himself? Where, therefore, awareness of its mystery, authority, and judgment has been lost? Where its authority and its singularity are neglected? Where awareness of the chasm between God and man, and therefore also the bridge which unites them, has been lost sight of? Is the Church surprised that it has little or nothing to say to the modern man? Continuing on this path, it will have increasingly less to say to him. Perhaps it is high time and a matter of supreme importance for the Church to take up in all seriousness the battle for the old truth, the battle of Nicæa and of the Reformers—God’s revelation is God Himself, the one, ever-present, eternal, and living God.
But whatever may be our judgment of the demands of the hour, this is the meaning, content, and dynamic of the revelation which met the biblical prophets and apostles: God Himself is here in the fact that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are here. He is with us as we are, yes, He is Himself what we are. He has assumed our nature; He has made our sin His own, and He has made our death His. To Him who is endowed with the fulness of the divine majesty, nothing that is human is foreign. He took upon Himself our fate, our godlessness, yea, the torture of our hell. Our deepest misery is His misery also. Yes, exactly in the depths of our misery He intercedes for us, and substitutes Himself for us, warding off the wages justly due us and suffering and making restitution what we could not suffer and where we could not make restitution. He Himself, Jesus Christ, who has suffered the death of a sinner and sits at the right hand of the Father, is our advocate. He Himself, the Holy Spirit, who with groanings that cannot be uttered, makes intercession for us who do not know what we should pray. 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,