The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation. Karl Barth
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formerly the supposed truth of his subject-matter in antithesis to Reformed teaching and only so can he make clear to himself the extent to which he must do so.
Assistance shall be afforded him here to enable him to reach such an understanding.
4. In accordance with the words of Lord Gifford’s will the “natural theology” which is to be advanced and diffused by means of the Gifford foundation ought first and foremost to serve the instruction of “the whole population of Scotland.” Since we are prepared to support his undertaking in the way described above, let us call to mind that instruction in the Reformed teaching which was at one time imparted to “the whole population of Scotland” in the form of the Confessio Scotica composed and ratified in 1560. We shall listen to this as a witness to, not as a law of, the Reformed teaching. We shall be acceding to its own request (Preface and Art. 18) if in repeating, expounding and presenting it we keep not only to its “historical” text and meaning but primarily and decisively to the Holy Scripture as heard independently, testimony to which the Confession claims to be and to whose judgement it has declared itself subject.
LECTURE II
(Art. 1a)
THE ONE GOD
1. Reformed teaching is the renewal of the prophetic-apostolic knowledge of God as knowledge of the one and only God. Beside and apart from God there is indeed His creation but no other God. No one and nothing is the Lord in the sense in which He is the Lord. God is not alone, but God alone is God.
2. This knowledge means above all the limiting of the self-assertion of man who participates in it; whoever and whatever he may be, he will be unable to conceive himself as identical with God and therefore as having mastery over God. Therefore this knowledge signifies further the relativising of all human ideologies, mythologies, philosophies and religions. Whatever their validity within the created world may be, their objects can certainly not be understood as gods. In the last resort they cannot be considered worthy of belief and proper reverence cannot be paid them.
3. The foundation of this knowledge is absolutely and alone God Himself, Who reveals Himself to man by speaking to him as his Lord in Jesus Christ and Who proves Himself to be the One to Whom no one and nothing is to be preferred or even to be compared. The foundation of this knowledge is therefore not the idea of the One (Monotheism), the direct or indirect propelling power of all philosophical, political and religious systems.
4. Between the claim to lordship of (subjective) human self-assertion and the various claims to lordship of the (objective) world there is unending strife but no decision is reached. But a decision is reached when man, placed between all these claims on the one hand and the claim of God’s command on the other, must choose God as the One to Whom alone he can entrust and bind himself definitely and completely and Whom alone he can worship. This decision, which becomes an event in faith in Jesus Christ, is the realisation of the knowledge of the one God. The power to reach this knowledge is the power of God Himself, Who makes it necessary and effective as a decision.
LECTURE III
(Art. 1b)
THE GOD OF MAJESTY, THE PERSONAL GOD
1. Who is God? Reformed teaching in principle does not answer this question by any free thought, i.e. as if the question had been raised and had to be answered by man himself. On the contrary, it answers it on the basis of God’s own revelation. That is, it answers it from the standpoint of man who has been told by God Himself in the Person of Jesus Christ who God is, and who has now to render an account to God, and not to himself, for what he has heard from God and has only so to render account to men also.
2. Because Reformed teaching answers God’s revelation, it necessarily gives a very humble and a very courageous answer. It is only in His revelation as Father, Son and Holy Spirit that God has encountered man as the Lord whose freedom and power have neither beginning nor end and who therefore is and remains hidden from us in a way in which the most radical scepticism cannot even imagine. But it is in His revelation as the Lord of Majesty that God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit has given Himself to be one with man and has therefore made Himself known in a way in which even the greatest speculative optimism is in principle superseded.
3. Because the One God is according to His revelation the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, He attests His Personality as personality in a majestic, pre-eminent sense of the concept, one which is not to be understood in the light of any view of human personality. God is a free subject, free as the One Who has, does and will establish Himself as a subject in His existence and essence and He is free as the One Who has absolute mastery over His own existence and essence and similarly through these has absolute mastery over all other existence and essence. Thus God is majestic just because He is personal, and hidden just because He declares His name: I am—that I am. He is incomprehensibly personal.
4. Because the One God is according to His revelation the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, He attests His majesty in a personal and therefore concrete sense of the term, a sense which is not to be understood in the light of any human idea of the “Absolute.” He is neither nothing, nor is He all, nor is He the one in all. His majesty consists in His being the archetype of what we ourselves are, i.e. He is the One, He it is Who knows, wills, acts and speaks; in His complete freedom He is in “I” in Himself, “Thou” and “He” for us. Thus God is personal just because He is majestic and He declares His true name just because He remains hidden to us: I am—that I am. He is incomprehensibly majestic.
LECTURE IV
(Art. 1c–2b)
THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE GLORY OF MAN
1. According to Reformed teaching, alongside the glory of God and for His glory, the world created by Him and man in particular have also a glory peculiar to them, i.e. a truth, an independence, a significance, a dignity and an appointed destiny of their own. The order in which they stand is of course that the glory of the world and man as one bestowed upon them by God for His own glory, is established by God’s glory alone and is completely conditioned and bound to it.
2. Because God reveals Himself to man in Jesus Christ, it is established firstly that not only does God Himself exist but that from God, by Him and for Him there exists also a real world and man in particular, which is distinct from Him. God does not rest satisfied with the fullness of the glory which He possesses in Himself but the glory which He possesses in Himself overflows in His making it the peculiar and perfect glory of the world created by Him and of man in particular to serve His own glory and in His being therefore Creator and Lord of this world and of man, without standing in need of them, in virtue of His eternal love.
3. Because God reveals Himself to man in Jesus Christ, it is established secondly that the existence of the world and of man in particular is grace, i.e. that it has its glory in the overflowing glory of God and not in itself and hence neither in its spiritual nor in its natural side, neither in its coming into being nor in its passing away, neither in its freedom nor in its necessity. Its being permitted to be gratitude for God’s grace and to serve His glory is what makes it true and real and possessed of meaning and purpose.
4. Because God reveals Himself to man in Jesus Christ it is established thirdly that in the midst of the real world in its entirety it is man who is called to be thankful, i.e. to recognise God’s glory in his own existence and to actualise it and in doing so to trust God who is Creator and Lord of the rest of the world besides.
5. The points which we have established are not a matter of abstract conjecture and reflection about “God,” the “World” and “Man,” but a matter of the exposition of the concrete revelation given in the Person of Jesus Christ. In this God Himself has confirmed and explained the order of the relation between His glory and the glory of man described above.
LECTURE V
(Art. 2c–3)
THE WAY OF MAN
1. The way of man as the way he goes himself is the history