Theology and Church. Karl Barth
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corresponds to God’s nature as man’s Creator and Redeemer.
We may expound this relation between theology and exact science in another way. All scientific activity is one in which the reason acts strictly and precisely in accordance with the nature of its object, and so lets the object prescribe for it both the limits within which it is to be known and the mode of rationality that is to be adopted toward it. But for that reason it also lets the nature of the object determine the kind of demonstration appropriate to it. It will not insult the object by trying to subject it to some kind of demonstration that has been developed elsewhere in accordance with the nature of a different kind of object, nor by employing for its investigation external criteria dragged in from some other realm of knowledge. The kind of verification it must scientifically employ is the kind that derives from and is in accord with the actual way in which knowledge has arisen. That is to say, it never seeks to impose an arbitrarily constructed possibility upon the reality it is investigating, but will only argue from the reality to its possibility and within that movement subject its knowledge to critical examination.
This is precisely the way which Barth adopts in scientific dogmatics—as we can see very clearly in his brilliant interpretation of Anselm’s theological method, and in the way in which he has worked out his own epistemology in strict obedience to the nature of the concrete object of theological knowledge, God come to us in Jesus Christ, i.e. in such a way that in all his thinking he really allows God to be God, and refuses to think beyond him or above him. The procedure common to theological science and all other genuine science is one in which the mind of the knower acts in strict conformity to the nature of what is given, and refuses to take up a standing in regard to it prior to actual knowledge or in abstraction from actual knowledge. Scientific knowledge is one in which the reason does not proceed in the light of some inner dialectic of its own, but one that arises out of determination by the object known and derives from the rationality and necessity of that object. In theological knowledge the reason lets itself be determined by the nature of God in his revelation, and adopts a mode of rationality that corresponds with God’s objectifying of himself for man. That is epistemologically the meaning of faith—faith is not in the slightest degree any irrational leap, but a sober commitment to the nature of the given reality, a determination of the reason in accordance with the nature of the object, an orientation of the mind demanded of it in encounter with its unique and incomparable object that is and remains Subject, the Lord God. Faith means that to the self-giving, the self-revealing, and self-communication of God in his Truth there corresponds in man a receiving, an understanding and an appropriation of the Truth, but in such a way that the rationale and necessity of faith do not lie primarily in itself but primarily in the object of faith. Hence theological knowledge is not a scientific explication of the nature of faith, but in faith an explication of understanding of the independent reality known. Theological activity does not proceed in the light of the theologian’s faith, but in the light that comes from the side of that in which he has faith, the self-authenticating and self-revealing reality of God that according to its very nature can be known and understood and substantiated only out of itself.
Barth can speak here of three levels or realms of reality, the realm of actual knowledge, the realm of objectivity that lies behind it and determines it, and the ultimate and primary realm of the Truth of God itself. Scientific theological activity is concerned with all three and with all three together in a compulsive activity. The realm of knowledge is the realm of noetic experience and noetic necessity. Scientific knowledge is concerned with a knowledge that forces itself upon us and to which we cannot but yield in truthful and faithful rational activity, but knowledge is not established so long as we merely remain on the level of noetic necessity, for the necessity in that realm derives from an ontic necessity at its basis in the object. It is only when theological inquiry presses into that deeper level that scientific understanding arises—that is, in a movement of knowledge in which we do not master the object but in which it masters us, in which we reach an ontic rationality in the object of faith and establish as far as we can the necessary relation between that ontic rationality in the object and the noetic rationality in our understanding of it. It is in the critical clarification of that profound objective necessity that theological knowledge claims to be thoroughly and strictly scientific because controlled and determined from the side of what is objectively given.
But scientific theological activity cannot stop there, for the nature of its object will not allow it to do so—it is required to act in conformity to the ultimate objectivity of God that confronts it within the realm of the objectifiable where God has revealed himself to us within space and time, within our existence and history. It is this ultimate objectivity of the Lord God, in which he stands over against all our thinking in the unique manner of the Creator over against the thinking of the creature, that characterizes all genuine theological knowledge and gives it its ultimate differentiation from all other knowledge. Theology would not be scientific, if at this point it drew back, and refused to acknowledge the unique nature of its object, in some false attempt to content itself with an objectivity that is merely like the relative objectivity with which every natural science is concerned, the objectivity of what is given to it in the creaturely world alone. It is this relation of primary objectivity to secondary objectivity that gives theological knowledge its great depth, provides it with its supreme determination, and gives it its great freedom under the sovereign objectivity of the Object that remains the absolute Subject. It is just because theological knowledge is confronted with the Lord God who lays his absolute claims over us that theological thinking can be carried out only in the strictest discipline, in stringent self-criticism and in utter obedience to the object. But because it is the Lord God who confronts us in theological knowledge, he confronts us necessarily as he who is greater than we can conceive, who transcends all our formulations of him, but who nevertheless gives himself to us as the object of our knowledge. Hence, even if our knowing of him is not adequate to his nature, it is not for that reason false, for he has come to us, adapted himself to us, and given himself to us to be known as reality within the actualities of our own being and existence, in Jesus Christ.
This means that the central and pivotal point of all genuine theological knowledge is to be found in Christology, in Jesus Christ in whom God and Man are one Person, in whom the primary objectivity of God meets us within the secondary objectivities of the given. A scientific theology will therefore operate on a Christological basis, for Christology will have critical significance for its inquiry into the understanding of the Truth of God at every point. Because God has once for all revealed himself in Jesus Christ, not in some merely transient fashion, which God leaves behind, and which man then, too, may eventually leave behind, but in such a way that God has for ever bound himself to our humanity in Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ bound us in a relation to him that is creative as well as redeeming. If God in Jesus Christ not only gives us to know something of himself, but gives us himself, if in Jesus Christ we are encountered not only by the Act of God but by the very Being of God in the Act, then we can never think of going behind the back of Jesus Christ in order to know God for that would be equivalent to trying to think beyond and above God himself, and to making ourselves as God. It is Christological thinking that teaches us to let God be God: to know God strictly and only in accordance with the steps he has taken to reveal himself to us, and therefore to test our knowledge of God in accordance with the steps in which knowledge of him has actually arisen and actually arises for us.
Now, if scientific theological knowledge refuses to operate merely within the noetic necessity of our thinking and speaking, but presses into the ontic necessity at the basis of those statements, that is into the inner rationality of the object itself, then it will be concerned to elucidate not only the basic noetic forms of rational theological thinking but the basic ontic forms through which everything is determined, for only in so doing can it establish the necessary relation between its thought and the object of its thought in a proper scientific manner. Hence theological thinking must probe into the inner basic forms and norms of its object as they are revealed in the material content of its thought. In other words, it will not employ any criteria in the testing and establishing of its knowledge in abstraction from its actual content, and will not elaborate any epistemology in abstraction from the full substance of theological knowledge—rather will a correct epistemology emerge, and a proper theological method develop, in the actual process of seeking full understanding of the object of faith and constructing a dogmatics in utter obedience to its