Theology and Church. Karl Barth
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does not pass over into some subjective state of ours, or into some transferable quality of the soul, and revelation is not something that inheres in the Church, but God actively confronting us with his own Person, and revealing his own Being in that action.
Is it not precisely the same battle that needs to be fought all over again in the twentieth century, but one which combines the forms which the battle took both in the fourth and in the sixteenth century: God and no other is the content of his revelation, and God is himself really the content of it? When we speak of ‘Christ’ is it really God himself in his revelation we mean? And when we speak of the Holy Spirit, is it really God himself in his freedom to be present with us, or is it just our spirit that we mean? Is it not the Godness of God in his revelation that has been lost, and is that not the cause of the secularization of the Church and the secularization of modern man? Has revelation not somehow just become identified with change and improvement in the life of man? Has not knowledge of God come to mean something that goes on in the depths of the human soul? Hence is it not high time to take seriously again the ancient cause of the Church, renewed with such vigour at the Reformation, that God’s revelation is the revelation of God himself, of God-in-his-revelation, and that he is to be known only out of himself, for the God whom we know in revelation is God who remains Subject even when making himself the object of our knowledge? Hence Barth insists that theology is concerned with a knowledge of God that takes its rise from the sovereign act of his self-revelation and which is actualized only by way of recognition and acknowledgement of the truth of God as the one reality that is grounded in itself and therefore to be understood, derived, substantiated only out of itself. It is the knowledge of the one Truth of God who is of and through himself alone, and therefore a knowledge that is in accordance with the nature of that which is known; it is the knowledge of the ultimate Truth which by its very nature cannot be measured by any standard outside of it or higher than it, for there is no such standard—rather does every other truth take its origin from this Truth and point away to it as its goal.
In the third place, Barth insists that revelation is rational event, for in revelation God communicates to us his Word, and conveys to us his Truth, requiring of us a rational response in accordance with the rational nature of his Word, and a self-critical relation to his Truth as it calls us in question. Not only is revelation God’s Act and his Being in that Act, but Logos, the source and fountain of all rationality, and therefore knowledge of God in his revelation is rational in its own right, rational on the ground of the supreme and self-sufficient rationality of its object, God-in-his-Word. Thus in revelation theology is concerned with a depth in objective rationality that transcends that of any other kind of knowledge and of every other kind of science. Barth will have nothing to do, therefore, with some kind of faith-knowledge that is basically romantic and non-conceptual and which needs rationalizing through borrowed forms from ethics and philosophy. Knowledge of revelation is ab initio rational, for it is engagement in a divinely rational communication.
That does not mean that Revelation is the communication of pro-positional ideas or concepts already blocked out in propositional form, for what is communicated is God himself, God as Truth, Truth as the Being of God in his revelation. This is Truth not first in noetic form, but truth as ontic Reality, Truth in itself, and only on that ground is it noetic truth for us and in our knowing of it. This noetic truth which belongs to our theological statements is only truth as it derives from and rests in the ontic truth of God’s self-objectification for us, and self-giving to us in the revelation of himself—it is truth that has an ontological depth of objectivity in the very Being and Nature of God-in-his-Word. This is the aspect of Barth’s teaching which was so strongly affected by his studies of Anselm as well as Calvin.
If we look back at these three aspects of Barth’s understanding of the self-revelation of God through his Word, and ask what he means by theology, we must say that for him theology is a thinking from a centre in God, deriving from his active communication of himself in the form of personal Being and Truth, and pointing back to him as the goal of all true human thinking and knowing. While theology necessarily involves two poles of thought, God and man, for it is man who thinks and man who knows, it is not a thinking and knowing from a centre in man himself but from a centre in God. It is man’s objective thinking of a Truth that is independent of him and is yet communicated to him. Theology is correct and true thinking when its movement corresponds to the movement of the Truth itself, and is a thinking in accordance with it, a thinking that follows its activity, thinking that is obedient to its proper object, the Lord God.
We may say, then, that theo-logy is logos of God in a threefold sense of logos. Primarily we are concerned here with the Logos of God that is his own eternal Word and Son, the ground and source of all our human thinking and knowing. But this Logos has become flesh in Jesus Christ, for in him God has revealed and communicated himself to us within the objectivities of our existence in time and space, in creaturely and historical being, and hence in Jesus Christ God has objectified himself for us and given himself to our knowing and understanding. Yet Logos, in this second sense as the object of our knowing, remains the Lord, indissolubly Subject, who encounters us as Truth to be known only in so far as he encounters us as the very Being of God in Person; who meets us within the objectivities of our world which he has assumed for his self-revealing in Jesus Christ, in such a way that he remains the Lord, transcendent to all these objectivities, so objective that we can never master him in his objectivity and subdue him to some form of our own subjectivity in knowing or understanding him, but can only know him as we serve him and are obedient to the Truth. But theology includes a third sense of logos, in which it refers to our way of knowing and understanding the Truth of God in accordance with the way in which he has objectified himself for us in Jesus Christ. Thus theology is an activity of our reason in accordance with the nature of its proper object, God-in-his-Word, or God-in-his-revelation, in Jesus Christ. Theology is critical and positive activity in which we build up our knowledge of God from his Word which he gives as the object of our knowledge, and in which we test our knowing to make sure, as far as we can, that our noetic logos corresponds to the ontic logos in that Word. Thus theology operates with a mode of rationality that is required of us from the side of the object, and proceeds positively and critically in accordance with the way that the Word has taken in his self-communication to us.
We speak of that concretely when we speak of Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, for he is the concrete act of God in his revelation, and therefore the peculiar object of our knowing that distinguishes theology from every other knowledge or science. He is the One who encounters as the very Being of God come to man within the actualities of man’s own existence and life and gives him knowledge and understanding of God.
As such Jesus Christ is the Way, as well as the Truth and the Life, who will be known according to the way God has taken with us in him, the way of revelation and reconciliation within humanity and history. Theological thought, therefore, cannot take a way of its own choosing or wander arbitrarily across country, but must keep to the way of the Truth, for that is the Way of Life. Theological thinking is historical thinking, not thinking about any kind of history or about history in general, but thinking that is a thinking out of this concrete centre in all history, Jesus Christ. It is through faithfulness to this Truth become historical event, to this historical event backed up by all the objective reality of the Being of God, that theology is theology.
Jesus Christ is the Truth as well as the Way and the Life, and therefore we encounter him in such a way that our thought is critically differentiated from other thought, from thought about other objects. Theological thinking is thinking that learns to distinguish truth from falsehood, because it operates with criteria and basic forms of rationality that it derives from the nature of its object. In so far as it is obedient to the nature of this Truth, it allows itself to be questioned by it, and allows all else that it may have claimed to know or may have claimed to be true, all its prior understanding, to be called into question, sifted and brought into conformity with the Truth as it is in Jesus Christ. There can be no neutrality here, for in obedience to the Truth of God in Jesus Christ theology is concerned with concrete and positive truth that must be articulated correctly, and therefore humbly in accordance with the nature of the Truth himself.
Jesus Christ is the Life, as well as the Way and the Truth, for this Truth is Truth in the form of personal Being,