God In Action. Karl Barth
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is reconciliation, as certainly as it is God Himself: God with us; God beside us, and chiefly and decisively, God for us.
Whatever else it may be possible to say about that nature and content of revelation is dependent on this fact. Call it an act of the divine sovereignty by which God declares, enforces, and maintains Himself to be the Creator of a man who, though he has abused and lost his freedom, nevertheless belongs to Him; the Creator of a world which, though it has become an enigma to this man, belongs to God, nevertheless. Call revelation an act of forgiveness in which God accepts this man in spite of his sin as one who is right for Him and so calls him His child out of pure mercy, i.e., for the sake of his divine righteousness. Call it an act of sanctification in which God gives man His commandment and calls him to Himself, lays claim to him for Himself, and dignifies him who is without capacity and good-will for God, that he might serve Him, live and suffer for Him, and love and praise Him. Call it an act of promise by which God gives to this man and to his world a hope and an outlook and expectation of His coming reign and kingdom, of redemption, joy, and peace in His kingdom, in which God, will wipe away all tears from their eyes and death shall be no more, neither mourning, nor crying, nor pain: for the first things are passed away.
None of these things are wanting in the revelation which has come to the prophets and apostles. They were right in giving it all these names and definitions. They met in it the sovereign will of the Creator, the Reconciler, and of the Redeemer. But let us not forget that they were met first and foremost with the sovereign will of God the Reconciler; first and foremost with Jesus Christ, the Word of God which has come to sinners; and first and foremost with the Holy Spirit through whom sinners are called to repentance. The second article of the Creed does not occupy its central place by sheer accident. Primarily and chiefly, it must be accepted as valid truth: God for us! Not something divine, not something akin to God, or something coming from God. No, God Himself. Since it has pleased God to grant us nothing less than Himself, we are compelled to confess: So great must be our misery that nothing less than God Himself was able to help us. Or, so great is God’s love for us that He refused to give us anything less than Himself. We need to thank Him that He did just what He did. 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.
AS WE begin our inquiry into the nature of the Church, it seems advisable to set forth, and reject, two errors.
The Church is not divine revelation institutionalized. It is not an organization into whose possession, disposition, and administration God has resigned His will and truth and grace in the form of a definite sum of supernatural powers, insights, and virtues. It is knowledge peculiar to the Church that God’s will is the will of a sovereign Lord who does not share his glory with man. The Church is aware that the truth of God is not an object—not even a supernatural object—but the eternal subject which makes itself known to us in a mystery only, and only to faith. And it is peculiar to the Church that it adores the grace of God in the person of Jesus Christ, i.e., a grace so original in character and function that it excludes every thought of cooperation, either of man or any other creature. The Church understands it therefore to be the sovereign act of the Holy Spirit. The Church is not a human way of salvation nor an apparatus for man’s salvation with which God identified His own kingdom. We have drawn a line of demarcation against the error of the Roman Catholic Church.
But neither is the Church a voluntary association for the cultivation of impressions, experiences, and impulses which men may have received from divine revelation and by reason of which they have formed definite convictions, condensed them into definite resolutions, rules, and customs of life and made them the center of their piety and morals. The Church is not the result of human election, decision, and disposition toward divine revelation. It arises from the election, decision, and disposition of God toward man. In revelation they have become an event. There God meets men and communicates Himself to men. Men are not gathered into, nor preserved as, the Church by an agreement in sentiments, convictions, and resolutions. Rather, it is the one God, one Christ, one Spirit, one baptism, one faith. The Church is not a religious society. We reject the error of modernistic Protestantism.
Both errors have two misconceptions in common. They magnify the Church while at the same time minimizing it. They magnify it by placing too great a trust in man, and they minimize it by trusting God too little. In the Church, man is neither a vessel of supernatural authority, insight, and power, as Roman Catholicism teaches, nor is he the free religious personality of modernistic Protestantism. And in the Church, God is neither the supernatural being which becomes actual here and there, by means of sacred channels, an object of man’s contemplation and enjoyment, nor is He something like an elan vital of nature or history to which a specific aptitude and experience provides access and over which man may, after all, gain control in the form of special convictions and attitudes, as a virtuoso has control over his instrument.
Rather, the constitution and preservation of the Church rests in this, that man hears God. This is what makes it truly great and truly little. In the Church man hears God because He has spoken, and he gives ear to what God has spoken. The Church exists wherever this is done, even if it consists of only two or three persons. Even if these two or three people do not belong to select society or average respectability but to the scum of the earth. Even if these two or three people are quite disheartened and perplexed as they face the question what they ought to do now about what they have heard. Even if they should not exert any influence and have no large significance in the environment and in the society in which they live.
The Church will gain true courage and genuine significance whenever and wherever it is firmly resolved to resign the false courage and counterfeit significance—the courage of large numbers, of moral qualities, of activistic programs, of effect on and appreciation from those without—with the intent of putting its sole confidence in what founds and preserves it as it unites in lending an open ear to what God has spoken.
Evangelism and cultivation of fellowship may be very desirable. We may well rejoice that the question of the form of our divine service has become an open question again; that the problem of ecclesiastical law does not suffer the neglect today to which it has been exposed so long; that theology everywhere is beginning to awaken in a new endeavor to be what its name implies. The consciousness of the political and social responsibility of the Church which has come to life with the beginning of our century almost everywhere where our evangelical faith is confessed, may be forced to change its form, but under no condition must it go to sleep again. It is necessary that the Church face, and face ever anew, the questions which the modern development of psychology and education propose to it, What is pastoral care? What is Christian education? And the Church must not attempt to escape the necessity of remembering and continually remembering what the missionary activities in its midst are saying: A world engulfed in a sea of misery is waiting—not for the Church but—to become Church itself. It is waiting to hear because God has spoken. It is waiting to hear what God has spoken.
But after affirming all these tasks, we shall be compelled to return—and in taking these tasks seriously we shall inevitably and unceasingly be compelled to return—to the beginning, not this or that good, however necessary it may be, but in all these efforts this one thing makes the Church a genuine church, namely, that man hears God because God has spoken and lends an ear to what He has spoken. And where this is not done, where perhaps only a sacred apparatus is functioning or where the interests of a religious association are substituted, where in one form or another too much confidence is placed in man, and God is trusted too little, there we deny the existence of a Church. It is not a Church even if it draws multitudes to its bosom and wins the support of the most outstanding individuals; even if it displays a rich variety of life and wins the profoundest respect of state and society.
At different points of our modern world we find ourselves in a promising, but also dangerous, situation. From many an unexpected quarter inquiry is made about the nature and message