Theology and Church. Karl Barth
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emphasis appeared, perhaps inevitably, greater than the positive.
Barth tells us in one of the prefaces to the Romans that the strangest episode that had befallen his commentary was its friendly reception by Bultmann and its equally friendly rejection by Schlatter! But that helped to open Barth’s eyes to his own theological position, for he discovered how deeply he himself was engulfed in the very notions he had been attacking, in the idea, for example, that God and man are posited together in a sort of coexistence which did not allow man to think of God except in a reciprocal relation to himself, so that man’s hearing of God and understanding of God itself belonged to the reality of the Word of God. Thus the ten years that followed the publication of the second edition of Romans were years of critical self-examination for Barth as he engaged in the many debates with Lutherans and Romans, orthodox confessionalists and liberal Protestants alike. Meantime the form of existentialism which he had himself advocated in the Romans, with its attendant notions such as of a timeless eschatology of pure event, had its measure of influence upon men like Bultmann and Gogarten, but while they moved on in the same direction, Barth moved out and beyond to make the centre and ground of his thinking the concrete act of God in Jesus Christ, not in any semi-pelagian correlation of God and man, but in the grace of God alone, which is the creative source and preservation of true humanity. It was on that ground that Barth set out eventually to build up a constructive theology, which laid the foundation for a genuine theological culture, without the confounding of God and man that is destructive both of good theology and good culture.
2. Theology and the Church
As we have seen, Karl Barth was concerned from the very start of his ministry with the problem of how to speak of God seriously to his congregation, and so to speak that in and through his speaking it was God’s own Word that was being heard. He was convinced that such speaking is not an art that can be learned and mastered like some technique, for even when a pastor does his utmost to speak within the realm of revelation and faith, he knows that nothing he can do can make his very human speech to be speech of God. He is faced, therefore, with the perplexing situation in which he ought to speak God’s Word and yet cannot speak God’s Word, for he cannot speak it as God speaks it. Therefore if God himself is to be heard when man speaks in his Name that can only be a miracle—because it is not something that falls within human possibility, it is a possibility that is thinkable only at the point where man’s possibilities come to an end. But that belongs to the minister’s essential mission, to know that he cannot of himself speak God’s Word, and therefore in his endeavour to speak what he has heard from God, he points away from himself to God in order to let God speak and God be heard not only in and through his attempts to proclaim God’s Word but in spite of his attempts. Because it is God who has commanded him to speak in his Name, God will himself fulfil what he commanded, and in his grace employ human preaching in obedience to his Word as his own very Word to men.
Theology cannot be pursued on any other ground than that: the theologian’s task is undertaken at the same command and in reliance upon the same grace in which God promises to make himself heard. But theology also has a critical task to perform. Just because God’s grace abounds in the midst of human speaking about God, that does not allow us to sin or to err in order that grace may abound. Rather does God’s grace lay such total claim upon us that we are summoned to responsible self-critical service of his Word, as those who have to give an account of their stewardship to God. Theology may thus be described as the critical activity serving the ministry of the Word of God in the midst of the Church. The Church must put its own preaching to the test to see whether it is really preaching of God’s Word or simply a form of self-expression. Theology is the critical task that refers preaching back to its source in the Word of God, to make sure that it is really what is heard from God that is preached and not something that is thought out by man and thrust into the mouth of God.
All this meant that Barth had to clarify for himself the meaning of revelation. Early in his theological career he came to hold that in revelation God is actively engaged revealing himself and that the only God we know is this God who reveals himself, God-in-his-revelation, God-in-his-Word who comes to us, acts upon us, and summons us into responsible relation to himself. Concretely that means that God reveals himself in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, and that this revelation creates out of the world a community of those who hear and respond and who by the impact of that revelation become the realm within which God continues to reveal himself through his Word to the world. This is the line of positive thinking that Barth found himself building up throughout the polemical years from the beginning of his professorship at Göttingen to the end of that at Bonn. There are several important elements here that we may look at one by one.
In the first place, Barth held with increasing vigour that revelation is act of God, dynamic event impinging upon us. This was held in conscious contrast to the view of Schleiermacher that God is to be thought of from the side of man’s feeling of utter dependence, rather than from the side of any active intervention on God’s part—hence doctrines have their ground in the emotions of religious self-consciousness, and not in any direct communication of truth. Admittedly Schleiermacher’s insistence that we must think of God as the co-determinant of this feeling of absolute dependence was intended by him to be an expression of the objectivity of God, that is, the unobjectifiable otherness or transcendence of God, but in point of fact, it yielded fruit of an opposite kind. Just because God-consciousness and self-consciousness are inextricably woven together in our experience, theology represents the projection into the mouth of a mute God the reflections of man upon his own feelings, or, to put it the other way round, it means the dragging of knowledge of God down within the circle of our own subjectivity.
As against the development of that line of thought going out from Schleiermacher Barth insists on the activity of God as the mark of his transcendence and freedom and independent objectivity. It is just because God actively reveals himself, because his revelation is and ever remains pure act which will never resolve itself into some effective receptivity or subjective condition of mine, that I continue to encounter it as genuine revelation, as Word of God addressed to me, which I cannot and must not mistake for a word of my own or convert into a word I can tell myself. God’s Word is unlike our words, for it is creative Word, Word that is also Act, and so Word that resists our attempts to domesticate or subdue it to forms of our own understanding, Word that acts creatively upon us, thereby calling us in question and summoning us to conform ourselves to it. Indeed God’s Word is an act of aggression on his part, for it is grace that contradicts us in our self-will, and so confronts us with a decision in which we have to act against ourselves in self-renunciation and repentance. It is through the objection of God’s active revelation that we are able to distinguish it from our own subjectivities and know it to be really objective reality independent of us, real Word of God, as distinct from mere word of man.
In the second place, Barth became convinced that one of the great decisive issues in the history of the Church, and therefore of theology, was the relation of revelation to the Being and Person of God himself—Revelation, as Calvin had taught, is God speaking in Person. In other words, Revelation is God-in-his-revelation, God-in-his-Word. As Barth read his Church history he saw that this was the supreme importance of the struggle of the Church in the early centuries for a true and faithful Christology. What the Church insisted on guarding at all costs in the Nicene Christology is that God communicates himself in his revelation—not just something of himself, not just something about himself, but very God himself. That is the meaning of the Trinity, that in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit it is God in his Godness who confronts us. Hence in believing in his revelation we believe in God himself, and we believe in God by believing in his revelation.
The Reformation represents a new struggle within the Church for the same truth expressed in the Council of Nicaea, by its insistence that Jesus Christ is very God and very man, and that the Holy Spirit is the Lord, the Giver of Life. In other words, it is the truth that God’s gift is identical with himself the Giver. The point of battle was doubtless the conception of grace, and the objectivity of divine grace was clarified in a struggle over justification by grace alone, but in and throughout it all it was the same truth, that in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit God comes to us in Person and gives us himself. God himself is the content of his revelation, and himself the content of