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PREACHING AND
KARL BARTH
INTRODUCTION
1 Thessalonians 2:13
“And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you
received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as
the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at
work in you believers.”
Martin Luther:
“Tis a right excellent thing, that every honest
pastor’s and preacher’s mouth is Christ’s mouth, and his word and
forgiveness is Christ’s word and forgiveness… For the office is not the
pastor’s or preacher’s but God’s; and the Word which he preacheth is likewise
not the pastor’s and preacher’s but God’s.”
“[God] condescends to enter the mouth of every
Christian who professes the faith.” [Therefore preaching must be]
“believed as though God’s own voice were resounding from heaven”
John Calvin:
“When a man has climbed
up into the pulpit… it is [so] that God may speak to us by the mouth of a
man.”
2nd Helvetic Confession (Heinrich Bullinger):
“The Preaching of the Word of God is the Word
of God.”
Karl Barth:
[Preaching is] “the
speaking of God himself through the lips of the minister.”
“…in what Church
preaching says of God, God Himself speaks for Himself.”
The scandal of preaching ought to be felt. We ought to ask ourselves, as Barth does,
“What are you doing, you man, with the word of God upon your
lips? Upon what grounds do you
assume the role of mediator between heaven and earth?”
Yet this question rarely occurs to modern evangelical
preachers. The scandalous miracle
to which these quotations refer – God speaking through the lips of the
preacher – is too often replaced by ‘leading a study’ or ‘walking us
through a passage.’
At the Evangelical Ministry Assembly of 2006, David Jackman
contrasted current evangelical convictions regarding preaching to those
of Calvin, Bullinger and Barth. He laments that nowadays, “‘Preach the Word’ has become ‘Explain the Bible’. There is a
difference.”
We note a similar diminution of the preaching office in Preaching
God’s Word - recommended
reading for Oak Hill Theological College’s ‘Advanced Homiletics’ course.
Before launching into
‘Beginning the Sermon Process,’
the book gives a single page to the definition of a biblical sermon: “one
that carries with it high biblical authority.”
Thus a “direct biblical sermon,”
as opposed to “indirectly” or “casually” biblical sermons, “carries the
highest level of biblical authority.”
Such a sliding scale at least honours biblical conformity. Yet on this understanding preachers
come between Word and congregation – they may do so to a greater
or lesser extent but always to some extent. In this situation preaching either doubts or dilutes the
authority of the Bible. It doubts
it if the preacher ‘comes between’ Word and congregation as the Word’s
helper. It dilutes it if the
preacher ‘comes between’ simply to pass on Scriptural information. In either case we are left with the
question of why should the preacher attempt at all to offer words in
addition to the written Word? If,
as the reformers contended so fiercely, the Bible is perspicuous, why should the
preacher take up thirty minutes of the service but the Bible reading only
three? If all that can be called
‘Word of God’ exists in the Scriptures alone, how do we dare to embellish
with our own blessed thoughts?
Without a robust theology of Christ, the Bible and
proclamation as the three-fold yet united Word of God, answering this
question becomes perilous. These
authors (who are typical of so much modern evangelical homiletics) make
no use of such a theology and so Bullinger’s dictum is reduced from,
“Preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God” to, “Preaching
of the Word of God explains and applies the Word of God.” The shift is as marked as it is
wide-spread.
It is arguable that few in our pews would recognise the former as,
historically, the evangelical position.
We perhaps feel that the latter position is the more
biblical. Yet as this textbook demonstrates,
the latter position undermines not only the authority of the preaching
office but, potentially, the Scriptures themselves.
This becomes clear as the remainder of the book consists in
equipping the preacher with scores of interpretive techniques.
Apparently the ten steps of sermon preparation are:
Step
10: Write Out the Sermon and Practice Delivery
Through these techniques the preacher ‘grasps’
the meaning of the text, measures the hermeneutical gap and carefully
crosses ‘the principilizing bridge’ etc. Once the meaning is ascertained, the
preacher exegetes their congregation, identifies the main points and
applies them to their hearts.
Throughout this process of explanation and application
it is difficult to avoid the impression that the Bible stands in need of
our interpretive and psychological expertise: the Bible needs explaining
as an obscure text and it needs applying as a distant text.
Thus, at one and the same time, the preaching office is unduly
exalted as the minister boldly stands in the gap left by the Bible’s
difficulty. Yet on the other, the
preacher’s office is diminished, carrying not the divine authority
of God’s herald, but only the “high” authority of the Bible teacher.
There are many ways that evangelicals can confuse their roles with
God’s. The so-called ‘humble’
among us will assume the role of plain expositor, laying bare the
text. The so-called ‘bold’ will
become the passionate communicator, ‘enlivening’ the Word with rhetorical
flair, persuasive apologetics and well-aimed application. However, in either case, whether as
explainers or appliers, preachers are in danger of thrusting themselves
forward as essential aids for a Word that seems less than ‘living and
active.’ In
reality we should be humbled by the impossibly high calling which,
nonetheless, the Lord of the Church lays upon us: to witness to Christ
from the Scriptures in His own name and with His own authority:
1 Thessalonians 2:13 And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you
received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as
the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at
work in you believers.
1 Pet 1:23-25 You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable,
through the living and abiding Word of God; 24 for "All
flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass
withers, and the flower falls, 25 but the Word of the Lord
remains forever." And is the Word that was evangelized to
you.
Hebrews 13:7 Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the Word of God.
In this context, Karl Barth’s theology of revelation provides much
that is helpful for the evangelical preacher. His doctrine of the three-fold Word articulates a biblical
insistence that Christ and Scripture and Preaching are the
Word, not in competition or fragmentation but in a relational unity. From such a foundation, Barth can
uphold the true character of the Word – even the Word preached – as God’s
own speech. This designation
implies that preaching is both a divine act and a self-authenticating
address.
This will be the order of our discussion. In the first section we sketch out
relevant biographical data and give an overview of Barth’s theology of
the Word. In the next section we
will spend the largest proportion of time on discussing the threefold
Word since this underpins all that Barth says regarding
proclamation. In the following
two sections we will discuss the nature of the Word as God’s speech
– first its character as ‘divine act,’ then its character as ‘self-authenticating
address.’ Each section is
divided into three: ‘exploration,’ ‘critique’ and ‘application for
preaching.’ However, these are not strictly discrete categories but are
rather like their subject-matter: perichoretic!
Background to Barth
“My
whole theology, you see, is fundamentally a theology for parsons. It grew out of my own situation when I
had to teach and preach and counsel a little.”
The theology of Karl Barth
(1886-1968) is a theology of revelation.
God is the speaking God and man is made truly man and truly God’s
possession in hearing. Our true
vocation can therefore be nothing less and nothing else than responsible
witness to this speaking God.
“‘Ye shall be witnesses unto me’: (Acts 1:8) – this is enough for
the one to whom Christ speaks and who has heard Him. Whether strong or
weak, willing or unwilling, successful or unsuccessful, the Christian is
a witness… In all circumstances and with the whole of his existence he is
a responsible witness of the Word of God. He is called to be this.
As such he is set at the side of God in the world, and therefore
set over against the world.”
Throughout Barth’s dogmatic
ministry, Grunewald’s Crucifixion (see above) hung above his desk
in which John the Baptist’s “strangely pointing hand”
witnesses “in an almost impossible way”
to Christ crucified. For Barth
this was the essence of the Bible’s testimony
and of our own. It is in witnessing to Christ
that we happily decrease and He gloriously increases.
This apprehension of the
living, speaking God was at the heart of every decisive turn which Barth
made from his liberal protestant education. This liberal background makes for fascinating reading in
Eberhard Busch’s biography:
Barth
studied at Berne, then Berlin under Harnack, for whom he had ‘high
regard’ and under whom he ‘was inclined to believe [Schleiermacher]
blindly’ (p40). After this, the
Ritchlian school of Tubingen did not impress him before finally he went
to Marburg (‘my Zion’, p44) and studied under Wilhelm Hermann, who he
soaked in ‘through all my pores.’ (p45)
The theology which Barth took
into his first pastorate was pure 19th century consciousness
theology. Barth preached the
inner Christ of faith and not the historical Christ of the creeds.
Yet certain events conspired to shake him out of what he later described
as a liberal ‘swamp’.
We will presently outline this
development from 1914 until the completion of his “Doctrine of the Word
of God” in
1937.
A Brief Outline of
Developments in Barth’s Doctrine of Revelation: 1914 - 1937
In 1914, Barth was shocked to hear his liberal teachers assert
“seriously that war was a revelation of God.” It was not so much the political but
the theological commitment that troubled him so deeply and set him
on the path of enquiry after a true theology of revelation.
At the time he was toiling away in his Safenwil pastorate (1911-21),
where the pressure of preaching Sunday by Sunday was exposing much of the
emptiness of his liberal heritage.:
“I had my theology. It was not really mine, to be sure, but that of my
unforgotten teacher Wilhelm Hermann, grafted upon the principles which I
had learned, less consciously than consciously, in my native home – the
principles of those Reformed Churches… Once in the ministry I found
myself growing away from these theological habits of thought and being
forced back at every point more and more upon the specific minister’s
problem, the sermon. I sought to
find my way between the problem of human life on the one hand and the
content of the Bible on the other.
As a minister I wanted to speak to the people in the infinite
contradiction of their life, but to speak the no less infinite message of
the Bible, which was as much of a riddle as life. Often enough these magnitudes, life
and the Bible, have risen before me (and still rise!) like Scylla and
Charybdis: if these are the whence and whither of our Christian
preaching, who shall, who can, be a minister and preach?”
In this situation Barth says, “I gradually turned back to the
Bible.” This turn produced his commentary on Romans
whose first edition was written in 1916
as Barth was discovering The Strange New World Within the Bible.
(This was the title of a famous lecture Barth gave that year). In Romans he launched a
scathing attack on “the liberal and ‘positive’ theology of the [19th]
century, arguing that it had ceased to acknowledge God as God.”
To read Barth’s Romans is to be confronted by a pastor and
bible student, thundering with all the passion and rhetoric of the
pulpit. Barth’s former teachers
were incredulous at this ‘homiletical’ style. Barth proclaimed: ‘God is God’, ‘the
Wholly Other’, ‘God is in heaven and you are on earth’, He exists in
‘infinite qualitative distinction’. All these phrases, now famous, are the
determination to turn from a man-centred theology and inhabit the new world
of the Bible, the world in which God is Lord.
This was for Barth indeed a new God! Around this time, he clearly speaks of abandoning the old,
liberal ‘god’ (‘We are heartily sick of our previous “God”’) and
embracing the living God.
Yet this produced the tension characteristic of his dialectical
school where God and man stand in paradoxical contrast.
There
was a humourous story circulating around this time that Barth and his
friend Eduard Thurneyson (founders of this dialectical school) used to spend
hours musing by the fire-side.
Barth would break the silence with an explosive ‘Perhaps!’ and
then suck on his pipe. Thurneyson
would respond an hour later ‘Or perhaps not!!!’
To re-introduce the Wholly Other into theology may be a much
needed ‘bombshell on the playground of the European theologians.’ Yet it could just as easily bracket
God out of our consideration as the old Schleiermachian / Kantian
dualism. To affirm the Wholly
Other in theology may, in spite of all our admirable protestations, leave
God in heaven and leave man to himself.
Thus Barth would need to learn that the turn from self cannot be
effected by our turn to God but only by God’s to us. Later he would put it like this: “The
beginning of our knowledge of God… is not a beginning which we make with
him. It can only be the beginning
which he has made with us.”
Barth had been concerned to give full weight to the revolutionary
miracle that ‘God speaks.’
What he now needed to affirm, in equally emphatic terms was that
‘God speaks!’
In the next decade of Barth’s life, he learnt time and again to
deal only with the Deus dixit, therefore to deal only with the God
who has, by His Word (and by His Word alone), transcended His
transcendence. In this way it became truly a theology
of the Word. As T.F. Torrance notes:
“From [the 1920s onwards] his theology became
the theology of the Word. Henceforth the concrete Word of God,
speaking to him out of the Holy Scriptures, became the object of Barth’s
theological knowledge and the ground of its certainty.”
Many, whose acquaintance with Barth is limited to his early Romans
period, equate his theology with a kind of Platonic or Kiekergaardian
dualism in which God is shut up over, above and against man. Yet the early ‘bombshell’ of Romans
is best seen as a reaction (necessary at the time) to a 19th
century theology that had become anthropology. Plato and Kierkergaard were crude weapons which he had to
hand and he deployed them with explosive force. Yet more mature reflection meant that Barth renounced these
philosophical systems and centred himself afresh on the Word alone. Barth spoke openly about such a shift:
“The positive factor in the new development was
this: in these years [the 1920s] I had to learn that Christian doctrine, if
it is to merit its name, and if it is to build up the Christian church in
the world as it needs to be built up, has to be exclusively and
consistently the doctrine of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the living Word of God spoken to us
men. If I look back from this
point on my earlier stages, I can now ask myself why I did not learn this
and give expression to it much sooner.
How slow man is, especially when the most important things are at
stake!… My new task was to rethink everything that I had said before and
to put it quite differently once again, as a theology of the grace of God
in Jesus Christ… I have
discovered that by concentrating on this point I can say everything far
more clearly, unambiguously and simply, in accordance with the church’s
belief, and yet far more freely, openly and comprehensively that I could
even have said it before. In the
past I had been at least partly hindered, not so much by the church
tradition as by the eggshells of a philosophical system.”
Whatever else is said about the reality of an ‘early Barth’ /
‘later Barth’ distinction, his speaking of the ‘other god’ of his liberal
past, and confessions such as these where he plainly describes a ‘turning
from [philosophical] idols’ must be taken with full seriousness. We therefore roughly trace a two-stage
development in Barth. He had
begun man-centred, had turned God-centred, and from this point onwards
became God-Man (that is, Christ) centred.
This journey meant re-writing Christian Dogmatics (1927) as
Church Dogmatics (1932)
– a service to the Church in which theology exists purely to test
Christian proclamation against its essence – Jesus Christ in the written
Word.
“The
theme of dogmatics is the question of the Word of God in the proclamation
of the Christian Church, or, concretely, the question of the agreement of
this proclamation with Holy Scripture as the Word of God.”
Barth’s method in dogmatics was decisively shaped by his
engagement with Anselm.
From Anselm he learnt the principle that theological enquiry is fides
quarens intellectum – faith seeking understanding. Theology does not and cannot begin
with any anthropological or philosophical foundations, but is rather “an
extension and explication of that acceptance of the Credo of the Church
which faith itself already implied.” God Himself has a Logos, and it
is this that must shape our words of Him. The “how” of Christian theology is not for us to
decide. It must be determined by
the “Who” of its Object. Given that this Who is, in fact, a self-revealing
Subject, we begin with unquestioning, obedient hearing. All Christian discourse (including,
and perhaps especially, preaching) will therefore be a “closed circle”
which “no one can enter… from without.”
In 1934, armed with this conviction, Barth identified two enemies
– his former friend Emil Brunner and that “false God”
National Socialism. The one sought from within to open out
the ‘closed circle’,
the other sought from without to become in itself an all-embracing order
of life.
To Brunner, Barth wrote an unambiguous Nein! To the Nazis, he framed the Barmen
Declaration
which is founded upon its first article:
Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy
Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have
to trust and obey in life and in death.
In both cases, the crisis was regarded as a threat to God’s free
and self-authenticating Word.
God’s revelation must be heard on its own terms and free from rivals. We will consider this
further in the final section.
By the time Barth published the second half of his “Doctrine of
the Word of God”, the year was 1937.
Much had happened since the first half-volume emerged 5 years
earlier both to Barth and his German-speaking audience! Yet ‘in place of
a foreword’ he quoted from Luther, “May Christ our dear God and the
Bishop of our souls… sustain His little flock by the might of His own
Word.” Barth was now thoroughly convinced
that the Word of God alone in its unfettered freedom had the power to
make and re-make His Church, to protect it from all enemies both within
and without and to trample down ‘Satan and this wicked world.’
We will understand why Barth was so confident in the Word’s power
if we briefly outline his theology of the Word.
A Brief Outline of Barth’s Theology of the Word
So much of Barth’s theology can be seen as an explication of that
first article of the Barmen Declaration.
Jesus Christ, the one Word of God, determines all we say of God,
all we are as Church and all we do as those claimed by
Him. Above all else, the Word
must be heard or else we will be left without hope and without God,
without Church and without a mission.
Our reconciliation from godless hopelessness comes in the Word
and constitutes the redeemed community – the Church – as a hearing
community, listening to the living Word.
“Where the Word of reconciliation creates human
hearers for itself, there is the church, the kyriake ekklesia, the
congregation of those whom the Lord has called.”
This community must in turn become responsible witnesses to what
they have heard.
“[The task of the Church] is no less, no more
and no other than the ministry of witness required of it and constituting
it.”
Again, “The first if not the only thing in its witness is the ministry of
the viva vox Evangelii to be discharged voce humana in
human words. It is its
declaration, explanation and evangelical address with the lips.”
Thus, “The essence of the Church is proclamation.” This witnessing, confessing Church is
constituted and re-constituted Sunday by Sunday as it heeds the living
Word proclaimed within it.
All else – including dogmatics, including diaconal service, even including
faith, hope and love – must take its cue from the central task of
proclamation.
“…we learn from the Biblical witness to
revelation that, over and above the command to believe, love and hope,
and distinct from the command to call in common upon His name, to help
the brethren, etc., Jesus Christ has given His Church the commission to
proclaim, and to proclaim through preaching and sacrament.”
Yet the revelation to be proclaimed “never meets us anywhere in
abstract form”
but only concretely in the Bible.:
“The Bible is the concrete medium by which the
Church recalls God’s revelation in the past, is called to expect
revelation in the future, and is thereby challenged, empowered and guided
to proclaim.”
As Barmen states, the one Word, Jesus, is attested in the Holy
Scriptures. Thus the Church is not free to choose
the Object or means of its proclamation.
“At bottom, the Church is in the world only
with a book in its hands. We have
no other possibility to bear witness except to explain this book.”
In this way Christ is to be proclaimed from – and only from – the
Scriptures. This is the three-fold form of the
Word of God (Christ, the Bible and preaching) which we will explore in
the next section.
For now we note that, for Barth, the Word proclaimed is the
rationale, starting point, guide and goal of the Church’s life and so,
derivatively, of theology which ought to be “nothing other than sermon
preparation.”
It should be clear by now why Barth’s theology provides a rich
basis for evangelical reflection upon the task of preaching. Given Barth’s context, given his convictions regarding the Word,
given that all six million words of his Church Dogmatics are meant
to be “the servant of preaching”,
one can understand why Barth’s “entire theological project” has been
called a “theology of proclamation.”
SECTION 1
The
Word’s Form: the three-fold Word
Exploration
“God
reveals Himself. He reveals
Himself through Himself.
He reveals Himself… God the Revealer is identical with His
act in revelation, identical also with its effect… [From this we learn] to begin the
doctrine of revelation with the doctrine of the Triune God.”
This important statement is found 340 pages into Church
Dogmatics. A casual reader
may have concluded that Barth begins with revelation before moving
on to the doctrine of God, after all that is the order of the
volumes. Yet Barth insists that
all he says regarding revelation is in fact grounded in trinitarian
theology.
This, once more, is the truth that Anselm had taught Barth: the
unique Object of theology demands a unique methodology that cannot be
determined in advance but must be given by God Himself. To speak of Him truly means to have
already heard Him and so already to participate in a grammar and logic
grounded in His life and being. This life is that of the speaking God
who, from eternity, has His being in and with His declarative Word
manifested through the Spirit of revelation. In other words He is Revealer,
Revelation and Revealedness. As Webster says, “Revelation is, in
Barth’s hands, simply the doctrine of God in its cognitive effect.”
This cognitive effect is therefore a divine encounter. It is the approach of God in His Word,
who, through the power of Himself, gifts to us nothing less than
Himself.
“It is God Himself, it is the same God in
unimpaired unity, who, according to the biblical understanding of
revelation, is the revealing God and the event of revelation and its
effect on man”
Therefore, to encounter this Word in this Power is not to deal
with an intermediate thing communicating a reality behind the
words. To encounter this Word is
to meet God: “Revelation is God Himself.”
Barth maintains that this is the unavoidable consequence of the
Nicene homoousios. God and
His Word (the Lord Jesus) are of one substance.
Therefore, just as
trinitarian theology had upheld the divine ontology of the Son in the 4th
century, and just as it maintained the divine gift of justification in
the 16th,
so in the battles of the 20th century it ensured divine revelation:
“Because revelation is God Himself! Twice the
Christian Church was compelled to contend for the victory of this
knowledge. The first time was in
the fourth century when the doctrine of the Trinity was at stake, i.e., the
acknowledgement of the essential deity of Jesus Christ and the Holy
Spirit. In consummating this
acknowledgement in a dogma, the Church gave expression to this: exactly
in believing revelation, the Church believes God Himself; and she
believes God Himself by believing revelation… The second battle for this
same truth was fought in the sixteenth century, when the Reformation
doctrine of free grace was at stake.
The reformers were concerned about a right understanding of the
justification of the sinner. They
contended that it was an act in which the gift which is bestowed on the
sinner is identical with the Giver of the gift, with His feelings,
disposition, and dealings with that man, with the deed of God in which He
gives and grants Himself freely to us: Immanuel. Jesus Christ is and remains our only
justification; therefore it can be ours only by faith in Him.”
And again, “The Reformation doctrine, in its
Lutheran as well as in its Calvinistic form, says with the same
simplicity as did the Council of Nicaea: God Himself is the content of
His revelation.”
God’s gift to us is the gift of God Himself. This is true whether we speak of ‘His
Son’, ‘His grace’ or ‘His Word’ – in any case, we are dealing really with
Jesus Christ. We are not held at
bay by God’s Son, by His grace or by His Word (i.e. Jesus)
but rather confronted with divine reality. Revelation is God Himself, it is Dei loquentis persona.
Yet of course the homoousios has been pronounced decisively
on the eternal Word – that is Christ, the Son of God – not on the Bible:
“In contrast to the humanity of Jesus Christ,
there is no unity of person between God and the humanity of the prophets
and apostles. Again, in contrast
to the humanity of Jesus Christ, the humanity of the prophets and
apostles is not taken up into the glory of God.”
What then of Scripture and proclamation which, biblically, can
also be termed ‘Word of God’? Barth replies that, while Christ as
God’s Word can be directly and unconditionally identified with God Himself,
Scripture and Church proclamation must be so derivatively.
“… in God’s revelation, God’s Word is identical
with God Himself. Among the three
forms of the Word of God, that can be said unconditionally and with
strictest propriety only of revelation, not with the same unreservedness
and directness of Holy Scripture and of Church proclamation as well. For if the same may and must also be
said of them, it must at all events be added that their identity with God
is an indirect one. Without
wishing to deny or merely even to limit their character as God’s Word, we
must think of the fact that here the Word of God is mediated, through the
human persons of the prophets and apostles, who received and handed it
on, and again through the human persons of their expositors and
proclaimers; that Holy Scripture and proclamation must always be becoming
the Word of God in order to be it.”
Yet, simply because Scripture and proclamation are indirectly the
Word of God, Barth insists they are no less a divine Word than the
eternal Son Himself. “There is no
distinction of degree or value between these three forms.” This is a crucial point. The distinction between Christ on the
one hand and Scripture and preaching on the other is not one of
value. Barth repeatedly affirms
that the Bible and preaching confront us with the Almighty Dei
loquentis persona. The distinction is one of mode. The Bible and preaching become the
Word of God themselves – i.e. God Himself written and preached –
by mediating and attesting Him who is immediately
and originally so:
“According to all that has been said,
revelation is originally and immediately, what the Bible and Church
proclamation are derivatively and mediately, God’s Word.” (I/1, p131.)
“Thus when it is revelation we are looking at
or starting from, we must say of proclamation and the Bible, that they
are God’s Word, by from time to time becoming God’s Word. But for that very reason we must not
say this about revelation itself, but the exact opposite, that it becomes
God’s Word, i.e. in the Bible and in proclamation, by being so in
itself. It is itself the very
thing that ‘elevates’ the Bible and proclamation, in the threefold sense
just discussed… It is itself
the Word of God which the Bible and proclamation are by becoming it.
(John 3:34-36)” (I/1, p133.)
The three forms therefore exist in co-equal, interdependent
relations, even if the 2nd and 3rd forms ever
receive their being and authority from the 1st. Though there is the distinction in
order, it is not possible to “regard any of the three forms of the Word
of God in isolation” since Christ, the revelation of God, meets us “only
in this twofold mediacy.”
“The revealed Word of God we know only from the
Scripture adopted by Church proclamation, or from Church proclamation
based on Scripture.
The written Word of God we know only through
the revelation which makes proclamation possible, or through the
proclamation made possible by revelation. The proclaimed Word of God we
know only by knowing the revelation attested through Scripture, or by
knowing the Scripture which attests revelation.”
It should be clear by now that this threefold yet united Word has
an analogy, in fact it is “itself the sole analogy” of God’s own
“three-in-oneness.” Thus the trinity has truly been the
beginning and rationale for Barth’s doctrine of revelation. The trinity has guaranteed that the
revelation of God is a truly divine encounter and it has also proved
itself the pattern by which God’s revelation – Christ – encounters us in
Scripture and proclamation.
The omnipotent Word by which all things have their life and being
exists with the Father in unimpaired unity;
this Word who is the Son comes by the Spirit,
to the prophets and apostles in undiluted yet mediated power.
Since this Spirit-breathed
testimony to the Son is indeed a witness, it calls for
contemporary proclamation of this same Word in a mediated but not
diminished form. Thus, when a preacher witnesses
Scripturally to Christ, what confronts the congregation is not simply
brilliant or boring exegesis, nor is it simply ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’
biblical authority. God Himself
speaks in the Sunday sermon.
“Proclamation is human language in and through
which God Himself speaks, like a king through the mouth of his herald.”
“…in what Church preaching says of God, God
Himself speaks for Himself.”
Critique
What of Barth’s
understanding of the second form?
Is Barth’s doctrine
of Scripture evangelical?
It is helpful to deal with
the Scriptural question here. For
one thing, Scripture must be prominent in any evangelical analysis, yet
particularly so with Barth, who defines preaching as “exposition of Scripture.” Willimon notes, “when Barth was asked
to say something about preaching in Homiletics, he mostly said
something about the Bible.”
Additionally, for Barth, the
nature of the Bible is intimately related to the nature of preaching and
of Christ. Apart from the context
of the threefold Word, Barth’s views on Scripture will be misunderstood.
In
what way is the Bible the Word of God?
“The Bible is God’s Word so far as God lets it be His Word, so far
as God speaks through it… The statement ‘The Bible is God’s Word,’ is a
confession of faith, a statement made by the faith that hears God Himself
speak in the human word of the Bible… The Bible therefore becomes God’s
Word in this event, and it is to its being in this becoming that the tiny
word ‘is’ relates, in the statement that the Bible is God’s Word.”
Barth does not hide his
being-in-becoming ontology of the Word.
In fact Barth’s actualistic as opposed to essentialistic ontology
causes him to apply “being-in-becoming” to proclamation,
to the sacraments,
to the Church
and even to God Himself! It is for this reason that T.F.
Torrance supposes that Barth intends a perpetual becoming of the Word of
God – an eternal generation of the 2nd form if you like. In this way God’s revelation in His
Son and by His Spirit is continually offered through the witness of the
Scriptures. While much in Barth’s
writings might be taken in sympathy with this reading,
and while nothing in our own reading would flatly contradict it, we must
concede that Barth does not clearly affirm such a perpetual becoming.
Instead the emphasis in
Barth’s thought is this:
“when
and where the word of the Bible functions as the word of a witness…
where the Word of God is an event, revelation and the Bible are
one in fact, and word for word one at that.”
These two italicised terms:
“event” and “witness,” are crucial for Barth. They can be thought of as parallel to the terms “proceed”
and “from” in Deuteronomy’s “every word that proceeds from the mouth of
God” (Deut. 8:3). We honour
(‘word for word’!) the revelation of God because these words proceed –
that is they come to us. And we
honour them not as ends in themselves but as words from the mouth
of God. The concrete words of God
recorded in the Scriptures encounter
us and lead us back to the
Speaker. This is the “event” of
the Word acting as “witness.”
In this, the “event” of
revelation affirms God’s freedom in condescending (never our work in
pulling Him down). The “witness”
of revelation upholds that Christ is the One Word of God, nothing can be
called revelation that does not lead back to Him. Since this revelation of God is
grounded in His own prior being and life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
it is the free God Whom we encounter and it is the free God Whom
we encounter. Again we see
that “event” and “witness” are bound together.
Thus, as the indented
quotation above demonstrates, these two conditions for the Bible’s being
God’s own Word to us are in fact one in Barth’s understanding. God’s freedom encounters us precisely
in that He is revealed in His eternal Word.
Too often critics of Barth see an arbitrary divine freedom
at work in this doctrine of the Bible’s becoming the Word. Thompson falls for this in his
otherwise helpful essay:
“[Barth may] have imported a notion of lordship
as absolute freedom which has been determined apart from and prior to
God’s own expression of his freedom in creation, covenant, incarnation
and the commissioning of Scripture.”
Yet, while the freedom of God is one of the dominant themes in all
Barth’s theology, it is a fundamental mistake to consider this as a potentia
absoluta in the classical sense.
Quite the opposite, Barth’s most scathing attacks on the old
orthodoxy concerned whether they had themselves erected an absolute and
unconditioned notion of freedom. For Barth, God’s freedom is ‘freedom used…
a decision made… a choice taking place.’ His potentia concretum
is expressed in Christ, for the incarnate Son is the place where He has
freely condescended to us.
“The mystery of the revelation of God in Jesus
Christ consists in the fact that the eternal Word of God chose,
sanctified and assumed human nature and existence into oneness with
Himself, in order thus, as very God and very man, to become the Word of
reconciliation spoken by God to man.” (I/2, p122.)
Notice here the language of choosing and of oneness. Notice too that this union of our
nature and existence with Himself is the Word spoken by God
to man. Thus there is no free-floating,
naked sovereignty but a choice for union in which our nature and
existence has oneness with God.
Yet this happens in the one place of God’s choosing – Jesus
Christ, very God and very man.
God is not shut up in and for Himself
but His life is a life for others that is opened out to us in His Son and
by the Spirit. Therefore, precisely because God’s
freedom is not considered “apart from and prior to” its expression in
Christ we must therefore be careful of seeing “creation, covenant… and the
commissioning of Scripture” as separate expressions of this freedom. Only when strictly co-ordinated with
the revelation of God in Christ can these be understood as the free
expressions of God’s Word.
The eternal Word has become man for all time but the
biblical words continue to become ours only in Christ.
This is the meaning of the “event” whereby Scripture becomes to us
a “witness” to Christ and therefore can be truly called God’s Word.
We note at this point Christ’s discussion
with the Jews of John 5. They
were encountering the “witness” of the Father
in the works of Christ, yet also, they had the Scriptures in which the
Father had (perfect tense) “witnessed concerning me.” Yet even their searching of the
Scriptures
leaves them ignorant of the voice of God and without His Word. Their problem was that they did not
come to Christ. They had failed to treat the
Scriptures as witness to Christ
and so Christ’s verdict is: “His voice you have never heard, His form you
have never seen, and you do not have His Word abiding in you.” The Bible, when uncoordinated with
Jesus, the one Word of the Father, is not another Word,
but leaves us entirely ignorant of God.
Can Barth therefore claim John 5 to be straightforwardly his own
position?
Not quite, two aspects should be
noticed. First the present tense
of “they… bear witness about me”
is an ongoing process in spite of the Jews’ unbelief. Second, the Word does not become nothing to the unbelievers but instead the witness
becomes accusation if not trusted. While Barth is clear that subjective
appropriation does not make the Bible the Word,
and while he teaches that the Word comes also in judgement,
both of these elements need greater articulation and emphasis in his
theology.
What does Barth believe regarding inspiration?
Given his convictions
outlined above, inspiration for Barth is not a “general, equal and
permanent”
inspiredness to this given text but rather refers to the event in
which this text in its this-worldly, “concrete form” becomes the bearer
of God’s own Word. To equate the text simpliciter with
revelation is to misunderstand the very nature of Scripture as witness.
“…we
do the Bible a poor honour, and one unwelcome to itself, when we directly
identify it… with revelation itself.” (I/1, p126)
Barth cannot imagine
labelling anything ‘Word of God’ in which the living Christ has not been
heard. To do so is to conceive of
revelation as something far inferior to Dei loquentis persona. Thus where a traditional Reformed doctrine
of Scripture sees inspiration and illumination as two distinguishable
acts of the Spirit (the one in the past, the other contemporary), Barth
effectively conflates them in the event of revelation:
God is now saying what He has said. Apart from this contemporary speaking,
the Scriptures are many things, but we misunderstand the full import of
‘Word of God’ if we apply that label unconditionally.
One can point to the past impress in which the Word
had come, like the crater caused by a meteor. One can figure out all sorts of things about the past
impact from the crater. Yet the
crater is not the crash of the meteor.
Revelation, in Barth’s sense, is always impacting – always a crash
from above. It should not be
reduced to an analysis of its effects down below.
As Barth said in his
Gottingen Dogmatics: “[Revelation is] not a condition, not an opening
through which any Tom, Dick or Harry may look into heaven, but a
happening.” Similarly, Barth was once asked, “‘What
differentiates your understanding of the Word of God from that of a
fundamentalist?’ He replied, ‘For me the Word of God is a happening, not
a thing. Therefore the Bible must become the Word of God, and it does
this through the work of the Spirit.’”
In all this, we are back to
the same conflict between an essentialist and an actualist ontology. The essentialist “is” in the
statement, “the Bible is the Word of God,” upholds the Scriptural
testimony that these documents are permanently and enduringly God’s
speaking. The actualistic “becomes” in
the statement, “the Bible becomes the Word of God,” upholds the
Scriptural testimony that it is entirely possible to hear the Scriptures
but not the Word of God. Is there a way out of this impasse?
Perhaps there is an
alternative which is suggested by Barth’s own doctrine of the threefold
Word – a relational ontology. If
the three Persons have their being in communion
then why should we not seek a perichoretic ontology for the three forms
of the Word. Barth makes many
moves in this direction,
yet fails to develop this as he ought since his tendency towards modalism
makes him conceive of the oneness of the three as that of identity. For Barth, the trinity is a “threefold repetition”. “We are speaking not of three divine
“I’s” but thrice of one divine I.” Therefore just as Barth’s doctrine of
the trinity tends to flatten out distinctions between Persons
so the three forms of the Word tend to be flattened in the event of
revelation. This lack of concrete particularity to
each of the forms means that they receive their being as Word not in
permanent reciprocal relationship but only “where and when” God chooses
to use them as witness.
In a sense then, Barth is insisting that we
never consider the Bible as Word of God apart from a relationship (of
witness) with Christ.
Unfortunately for Barth this relationship is (probably) not
perpetual but occurs only in the event.
A perichoretic ontology would allow the Bible to be continually
God’s Word precisely because it exists continually in this relationship
with the eternal Word. With a
more truly perichoretic ontology we can say that the Bible is not itself
the eternal Word yet it has a permanent and distinct existence as
Word-from-Word. To borrow the terminology
of Nicea, it is Word from Word, Light from Light, True Word from True
Word, ek thj
ousia tw logoi.
In all this we see a direct
parallel between the debate over calling the Bible “the Word of God” and
the debate over calling Jesus “God.”
The answer to both (for Barth and for all orthodox) is Yes. Yet it is a further question to ask
from where does this divine nature come?
Is the divine authority of the Bible unbegotten in a way parallel
to the Calvinist doctrine of the aseity of the Son? Perhaps it is not surprising that B.B.
Warfield, who so thoroughly approved of Calvin’s
autoousia of the Son, also championed the direct and inherent
inspiration of the Scriptures! In both, the 2nd form does not
receive its divine being from the 1st but has it of itself (a
se). Yet just as we prefer Nicaea’s “God from God” to Calvin’s aseity of the Son, so we
reject an aseity of the Word and find ourselves warming to Torrance’s
undoubtedly Barthian doctrine of Scripture:
“This
calls for a dynamic, not a static, concept of verbal inspiration. All Scripture given by divine
inspiration is and becomes what it really is through the presence and
advocacy of the Holy Spirit. The
Spirit of God is God in his freedom to be present to what he has brought
into being through his Word and to realise its true end in himself
through a relation of himself to himself.”
The Bible can never compete
with or replace the eternal Word and nor can it be considered without
Him. Instead the 2nd
form of the Word ever receives its life and being from the 1st
and ever witnesses back to His reality as the one revelation of the
Father without Whom Scripture and preaching are nothing. We note that Barth quotes Luther
approvingly, “to have the Scripture without knowledge of Christ is to
have no Scripture.”
Certainly Barth’s eventism
provides shaky foundations for his doctrine of Scripture. Yet his determination to view the
Scriptures christocentrically must be applauded. His seeming allergic reaction to
permanent and inherent inspiration was at times misguided. Yet what he sought to uphold – solus
Christus – is of paramount importance. Barth was right to insist that inspiration is never the final
or decisive answer to the authority question.
“Why
and in what respect does the Biblical witness possess authority? In that it claims no authority
whatsoever for itself, that its witness amounts to letting the Something
else [i.e. revelation – Jesus Christ] be the authority, itself and by its
own agency.” (I/1, p126)
Inspiration is not the answer
to the question “why are these texts authoritative?” Certainly inspiration was not the
answer that Luther and Calvin gave to that question.
We must always rely on the speaking of God in the Bible for its
authority. We must always live by faith.
Yet, Scripture’s own testimony regarding itself demands we confess
a permanent inspiration. We therefore conclude that T.F.
Torrance’s dynamic, continual doctrine of inspiration maintains Barth’s
concerns and is grounded in Barth’s own convictions regarding the
threefold Word. Additionally it
upholds the enduring nature of Scripture’s witness. This affirmation of the Bible’s
continual inspiration is a necessary but (as Barth saw) never the
decisive or sufficient condition of the Word’s authority.
What of Barth’s contention that Scripture has a
‘capacity for error’?
Barth’s unfortunate belief in
Christ’s fallen flesh
has consequences when the christological analogy is applied to the Bible. With both Christ and the Scriptures,
the Word meets us in our humanity. For Barth this must mean a fallen
humanity for that is the condition in which He finds us. Therefore Christ assumed fallen flesh
(though He was Himself sinless) and the humanity of the Bible has a
“capacity for error.”
Yet, just as Christ never sinned, the Bible’s “vulnerability” does not
imply actual error. Nonetheless, for the same reasons that we must
reject the fallen humanity of Christ we must reject this doctrine.
What of Barth’s view of history?
Van Til laments that, even
though Barth believes in the historical events conveyed in the Bible,
for him, “history as such is never revelational of God.” Barth, though could never satisfy a
request that revelation be understood according to a prior understanding
of ‘history’. Of course history occurs within the
Bible, but
it occurs within the strange new world of the Bible and is to be
understood only on its terms.
The historical resurrection happened not “according
to history” but “according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians
15:3,4). Those to whom He
appeared were not impartial historians but prepared witnesses. (Acts
10:41; 13:30). It should be remembered
that understanding Jesus “according to the flesh” is something the
Christian does no more. (2 Cor. 5:16) cf I/1, p168.
With Barth we may lose an
evidentialist apologetic but we gain an unshakeable confidence that the
findings of historical-criticism are merely those ‘according to the
flesh’ (2 Cor 5:16). The Christian must move on from this.
From the preface to the first edition of Romans:‘Paul,
as a child of his age, addressed his contemporaries. It is, however, far more important
that, as Prophet and Apostle of the Kingdom of God, he veritably speaks
to all men of every age. The
differences between then and now, there and here, no doubt require
careful investigation and consideration.
But the purpose of such investigation can only be to demonstrate
that these differences are, in fact, purely trivial. The historical-critical method of
Biblical investigation has its rightful place: it is concerned with the
preparation of the intelligence – and this can never be superfluous. But were I driven to choose between it
and the venerable doctrine of Inspiration, I should without hesitation
adopt the latter, which has a broader, deeper, more important
justification. The doctrine of
Inspiration is concerned with the labour of apprehending, without which
no technical equipment, however complete, is of any use whatever.
Fortunately I am not compelled to choose between the two. Nevertheless, my whole energy of
interpreting has been expended in an endeavour to see through and beyond
history into the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit. What was once of grave importance, is
so still. What is today of grave
importance – and not merely crotchety and incidental – stands in direct
connection with that ancient gravity.
If we rightly understand ourselves, our problems are the problems
of Paul; and if we be enlightened by the brightness of his answers, those
answers must be ours.”
We can preach with freedom
since “no historian’s judgement can make this text unserviceable as the
Word of God.”
Application
to Preaching
We must be Biblical
In practice, Barth’s use of
the Scriptures in preaching appears not less but more biblicist than most
evangelical homiletics.
Note, for instance, David Buttrick’s comments in the
foreword to Homiletics: “Probably Barth has been criticized most
for his strong, uncompromising biblicism: so strong that he is willing to
suggest that preachers risk no more than a “reiteration” of the text…
Barth clings to scripture, guards scripture fiercely and will allow no
dilution of scripture’s divine Word… He is unabashedly biblical and seems
to have had no awareness of the “hermeneutical problem” that within a
quarter of a century would agitate the theological community.”
Preaching, for Barth, takes place
precisely in the expectation that the event of revelation has been
promised in the past, will happen in the future and is to be sought
nowhere else than in the Scriptures. Christ never meets us anywhere
but in the Bible. Barth therefore urges ministers to
preach word-for-word and verse by verse.
We will see more on this in the final section. For now we note Barth’s advice in Homiletics
which is humblingly biblicist.
See for instance pp75-81.
In it he says such things as, “preaching is exposition of
Scripture” (p75); “[we are] set there to expound this book – that
and nothing else.” (p76); First and foremost preachers are to have
“absolute confidence in holy scripture.” (p76) “The sermon will be like
the involuntary lip movement of one who is reading with great care,
attention and surprise, more following the letters than reading in the
usual sense, all eyes, totally claimed.” (p76); “The gospel is not in our
thoughts or hearts; it is in scripture.” (p78). See also “Our task is simply to follow the distinctive
movement of thought in the text, to stay with this, and not with a plan
that arises out of it.” (p49); “In both form and content [preaching] must
be exposition of scripture.” (p88)
Additionally Barth claims
that the Bible’s becoming the Word of God makes a greater claim
on us to revere the Scriptures than the doctrine of an inherent verbal
inspiration.
“Simply
to have read somewhere that the Bible is God’s Word is not the
point. Preachers are summoned to
a life history with the Bible in which something constantly takes place
between them and God’s Word… The proper attitude of preachers does not
depend on whether they hold on to the doctrine of inspiration but on
whether or not they expect God to speak to them here.”
Interestingly John Stott writes very similar words
regarding “inerrancy” in Evangelical Truth: A Plea for Unity, IVP,
1999: “It is unwise and unfair to use ‘inerrancy’ as a shibboleth by
which to identify who is evangelical and who is not. The hallmark of authentic evangelicalism
is not subscription but submission.
That is, it is not whether we subscribe to an impeccable formula
about the Bible, but whether we live in practical submission to what the
Bible teaches, including an advance resolve to submit to whatever it may
later be shown to teach.” (p73-74)
Due reverence for the preaching office
Far from creating a ‘pulpit
pope’, the divine authority of the third form of the Word, humbles both
preacher
and congregation
and provides natural limits on the authority of the preacher. This authority exists only within the
perichoresis of the forms.
Therefore preachers can claim to speak God’s Word only to the
degree that they proclaim Christ biblically. There remains a place for the congregation to “test the
spirits”
and to play the Bereans. Yet where Christ is proclaimed
biblically, there we hear God’s own Word. When this happens:
“the
Content of revelation is God alone, Holy God, God Himself. Christian preaching must be aware of
this.”
Firstly the congregation
should be aware of this. Barth
has said, “you cannot go in and come out [of church] peacefully” On a Sunday morning there must be a
sense of expectancy that God Himself will encounter us in His Word
proclaimed – a preparedness to be deeply shaken. Do we create an atmosphere of
expectancy in our services?
How do we introduce the sermon in the leading of the
service? How do we pray for
it? How is it listed in the
service sheet? Perhaps we should
call the Bible reading: “Reading of God’s Word” and the sermon:
“Proclamation of God’s Word.”
Secondly, preachers
should be aware of this. Is our
manner and tone appropriate to our calling as God’s heralds?
Luther has spoken with jaw-dropping audacity of the authority of
preaching:
“…a
preacher must not say the Lord’s Prayer, nor ask forgiveness of sins,
when he has preached (if he is a true preacher)… It is neither necessary nor good to
ask here for forgiveness of sins, as though the teaching were false. For it is not my word but God’s, which
He neither will nor can forgive me, and for which He must always praise
and reward me saying: You have taught rightly for I have spoken through
you and the Word is mine. Whoever
cannot boast thus of his preaching repudiates preaching; for he expressly
denies and slanders God.”
Do we summon as God summons,
warn as God warns, plead as God pleads, comfort as God comforts, declare
as God declares? Are the
congregation aware that disobedience to the Word proclaimed is
disobedience to Christ Himself?
Christ must be proclaimed
Scripture does not exist in
and for itself but is inherently testimony. To honour the Bible therefore we must never preach on the
Bible, rather from, with and by the Bible we proclaim
Christ.
“I have not to talk about Scripture but from
it.” (Homiletics, p49)
“Biblical preaching is not talking about the Bible.
Biblical preaching is talking about what the Bible talks about – that is,
it must be focused on the gospel of Jesus Christ.” (Iain Taylor,
“Evangelicals and Preaching,” from Not Evangelical Enough,
Paternoster Press, 2003, p121.)
Understanding the Scriptures
is vital but it is never a task that terminates on the text itself. Instead to understand the Scriptures
means “from beginning to end and from verse to verse, to understand how
everything in it is related to [Jesus Christ] as to its invisible-visible
centre.”
“The
Bible says all sorts of things, certainly; but in all this multiplicity
and variety, it says in truth only one thing – just this: the name of
Jesus Christ… The Bible becomes clear when it is clear that is says this
one thing… The Bible remains dark to us if we do not hear in it this
sovereign name… Interpretation stands in the service of the clarity which
the Bible as God’s Word makes for itself; and we can properly interpret
the Bible, in whole or part, only when we perceive and show that what it
says is said from the point of view of that… name of Jesus Christ.”
Thus Barth insists that “the Old Testament is witness to Christ, before
Christ but not without Christ.” He insists that “the literal sense”
does not exclude Christ but has its “sights [set] on Christ. As a wholly Jewish book, the Old
Testament is a pointer to Christ.” We might imagine, as in so much modern
evangelical preaching, that Barth intends the christological meaning to
be a sensus plenior in addition to the literal sense.
Yet for Barth, Scripture is not first an historical document and then
spiritual. When viewed according
to its proper nature, it is always testimony to Christ.
In
this sense we feel Barth would agree with the sentiments of John
Sailhamer, Walter Kaiser and Gordon McConville: [Sailhamer quotes Kaiser] “ . . . if it is not in the OT text, who cares
how ingenious later writers are in their ability to reload the OT text
with truths that it never claimed or revealed in the first place? The
issue is more than hermeneutics,” says Kaiser. “The issue is that of “the
authority and content of revelation itself!” Another evangelical OT
scholar, Gordon McConville, has also stressed the importance of the
Messiah in the OT. McConville says, “If the Old Testament is the problem of Christian theology
. . . , [then] the Messiah is at the heart of that problem.” McConville
goes on to say that “the validity of a Christian understanding of the Old
Testament must depend in the last analysis on [the] cogency of the
argument that the Old Testament is messianic.”
Therefore, “the natural sense is the issue… [we do not] give the
passage a second sense.”
The preacher is to proclaim Christ from the Old Testament yet not
according to an imposed plan added to the primary sense but according as
this Jewish Scripture is already and inherently a proclamation of Christ.
We note however, as Barth
did, that christocentric preaching does not simply challenge our Old Testament
hermeneutics. Within conservative
evangelical circles we are now used to preaching Christ from the Old
Testament (even if in the “second sense” mentioned above). Yet ‘Christ in the New Testament’
seems to present the new challenge.
Barth notes how many elements of the New Testament can be preached
as though these things are themselves the “original” or “important”
object of witness rather than Christ.
“One can never say of a single part of the narrative,
doctrine and proclamation of the New Testament, that in itself it is
original or important or the object of the witness intended. Neither the ethics of the Sermon on
the Mount nor the eschatology of Mk 13 and parallels, nor the healing of
the blind, lame and possessed, nor the battle with the Pharisees and the
Cleansing of the Temple, nor the statements of the Pauline and Johannine
metaphysics and mysticism (so far as there are any), nor love to God nor
love to neighbour, nor the passion and death of Christ, nor the
miraculous raising from the dead – nothing of all that has any value,
inner importance or abstract significance of its own in the New
Testament, apart from Jesus Christ being the subject of it all. His is the name in which it is all
true and real, living and moving, by which, therefore, everything must be
attested.” I/2, p10-11
Christ and His saving work is
often more likely to be preached from an Old Testament passage than from
the New since we have all learnt by now that the Hebrew Scriptures
require a “bridge to Christ.” We
wonder therefore, what is motivating preachers to add the “bridge to
Christ” section to their sermons?
Is it a bad conscience? Is
it an apology for the Old Testament’s supposed lack of
Christ-centred-ness? Or do we
believe that christocentricity is already and inherently the
nature of the Spirit’s testimony to the Son? Do we preach Christ with and through Scripture or do we
feel obliged to do so apart from it?
Barth would urge us to view the Scriptures as already testimony to
Christ and in no need of our ingenius bridges. He encourages us to approach our OT text in the confident
expectation of messianic hope.
Christ
must be proclaimed
It is common to attribute
Barth’s beliefs regarding the Bible to his commitment to divine
freedom. Some, rightly, see at
work his christocentric convictions.
Few though are aware of his homiletic concerns. In a lengthy aside,
Barth speaks of the danger of “freezing up” the “dynamics of the mutual relationships
between the forms” and in this way stopping the flow that is meant to
come from Christ through the Scriptures and out into
proclamation.
“This is shown in the doctrine of inspiration, which
so to speak signifies a freezing up of the connection between Scripture
and revelation. But it is shown above all in the fact that with the
theologians of this period real and essential knowledge of proclamation,
the third form of the Word of God, has apparently ceased. True, even with
the ‘Word of God’ means preaching, but the real point of connection
between revelation and Scripture in the present is increasingly for them
something quite different from the act of Church proclamation: it is the
knowledge, faith, sanctification, holiness of the individual. But in that
case their unity of revelation and Scripture, however stiff an
objectivity it may be arrayed in, had to degenerate into the appearance
of being, not so much a dealing by God with His Church, but rather a
divine private institution for such-and-such a number of private
individuals, for achieving which preaching and sacraments were in that
case still quite good enough as so called ‘media salutis.’ By
forgetting that primarily the correlate to revelation and Scripture is
simply but the beatitude or amelioration of the human individual, but (on
the same level as revelation and Scripture) proclamation in service to
God, the Church forgot no less than herself; she made herself, instead of
a place for the service of God, by which as such men are also helped, a
place of very splendid service man, in which God (p140) must figure
exclusively as the most highly objective, most highly miraculous means,
but still only as the means. The glory of objectivity in which the Word
of God was enveloped, above all in its Biblical form, was even so
something like the utterance of a bad conscience, by which the fact was
concealed that men had ceased properly to be aware what they were saying,
when they said ‘Word of God,’ ceased to be aware that they are thus
expressing action taking place to-day – not of man in his relation to
God, but of God in His relation to man – and thus expressing no less than
the Church. When that awareness
ceased, was it surprising that Modernism in its recent inroads discovered
that the goal of a very splendid service to man could also be reached by
a simpler and less miraculous way than that which orthodoxy still
continued to assert with great outward, but not quite so great inward,
fidelity? Was it surprising, if the objectivity which orthodoxy continued
to claim for revelation and Scripture and theoretically also for
preaching and the sacraments, struck one bright spirit and thousands of
bright spirits, yes, even thousands of pious hearts, more and more as a
superfluous idol, the smashing of which was bound to appear to them a
good work, well-pleasing to God?
The catastrophic breakdown of orthodoxy in the 18th
century, the consequences of which we have to shoulder to this day, is no
greater puzzle than the collapse of a house whose foundations are giving
way. It is not philosophy of the
world become critical, but the Church’s own theology become uncritical,
ceasing to understand itself at the centre, which is responsible for that
evil.” (I/1, p139-140)
If the Bible is testimony to
revelation then to honour this testimony will mean testifying alongside
it, that is preaching. Yet if
attention fixes on the Bible as revelation in itself then it is
used less and less for “the act of Church proclamation” and more and more
for “the knowledge, faith, sanctification, holiness of the individual.” The Bible begins to provide a “very
splendid service for man” (“the beatitude or amelioration of the human
individual”) rather than the grounds for our service to God
(proclamation). Yet to ‘un-freeze’ these dynamic,
mutual relations will mean that once again, in Gustaf Wingren’s memorable
phrase, the Bible will overflow into preaching. This is Barth’s intention in all his
theology.
The threefold Word means that
preaching is not simply a very fine practice but an inevitable
consequence of the Lordship of Christ. There is the deepest bond between
revelation, witness and confession.
You cannot know Christ or have the Bible and not be a
contemporary witness to what you have heard. This is “the unavoidable affinity between knowledge and
preaching” or, to put it in Paul’s words: “I
believed therefore I spoke.”
When the Bible (or Christ) is
viewed outside of the three-fold relations, we begin to view the point of
revelation as terminating on us.
Yet, fundamentally the Bible is not about us, but about Him. And the Scriptures have been given us
not, primarily, to aid our sanctification but our proclamation! The Bible
constitues us as witnesses not pietists.
The essence of the Christian life ought to be understood not so
much as my personal walk but as the community’s corporate witness
(my personal holiness being comprehended in the greater task).
We must ask ourselves
therefore, do we engender a “Bible and me” spirituality? Or are the Scriptures handled as the
Spirit’s testimony to the Son, addressed to the Church and
intended for proclamation? Is our
notion of Christian maturity basically the amelioration of the individual
or the corporate confession of Christ to the world?
SECTION 2
The Word’s nature:
God’s speech as divine act
The threefold Word guarantees that God Himself addresses us
through the speaking Christ, witnessed in the Scriptures and proclaimed
in the Church. In the next two
sections we will consider the implications of this event being in fact
God’s speech. We will do so by
exploring two pairs of thought:
God’s speech means divine act and self-authenticating
address.
In each proposition the first term describes the nature of the
Word as it comes from God, the second describes the manner of its coming
home to man. In the first
proposition we consider the Lord’s initiative and intention. When we examine the second (in the
next section) we will consider our appropriation.
We spend time exploring these notions since they correspond to the
movement of preaching from the text to the
congregation. This necessary
movement gives rise to the common conception of the preacher’s task as
one of explanation and application. While Barth is aware that preaching
involves these two aspects,
he is adamant that the “problem” of “closeness to the text” and
“closeness to life” is one “we can only describe and not solve.” It is not in the preacher’s power
either to explain or apply the Word but this power lies wholly in the
perspicuous and living Word itself. Every preacher must therefore be aware
of the nature of the Word they proclaim lest they exalt themselves,
denigrate the Word and, ironically, degrade their office.
Exploration
“‘God’s Word’ means God
speaks.” This speech is the rational,
personal,
purposive
encounter of the free Lord who comes to us of His own grace and in His
own power. Given this divine
power, there is no sense in separating God’s Word from God’s act since
this Word, being God’s, effects what it says. In this way the Lord Himself attends
His Word
with an omnipotent, ruling authority.
We will here consider the
free-ness, the personality and the active power of this encounter.
God’s freedom in revelation
Barth’s use of “freedom”, “miracle”
and “event” all uphold the same thought: revelation is not something for
which we are fitted by nature nor something to which we contribute. Barth is adamant that if there is any
synergism in revelation then God is not free but made a prisoner of our
‘freedom’. Thus Barth claims, “He is the Lord of
the verbal character of His Word.
He is not bound to it, but it is bound to Him.”
For Barth, the asymmetry of
Christ’s relationship to the Bible serves both a christological and a
homiletical function. First, it
flows out of the remembrance of the personal nature of the Word of God
“which we cannot avoid when we remember that Jesus Christ is the Word of
God.” Barth fiercely guards against the
reduction of revelation to propositions since its ultimate form is the Person
of Christ. Thus Barth’s intention in saying ‘He
is not bound to [the Bible], but [the Bible] is bound to Him,’ could also
be captured in the following sentiment:: ‘Christ may communicate Himself
to us via words but our attempts to grasp these words is not the same as
grasping (or, rather, being grasped by) their personal Speaker.’
Second, Barth’s homiletical
purpose follows these words immediately.
“He thus has free disposal of the verbal
character of Holy Scripture… He [therefore] can select a new verbal form
beyond the verbal form of Holy Scripture; for what Holy Scripture
proclaims as His Word, can be proclaimed again as His Word in a new
verbal form, always in such a way that it is He Himself who speaks in
this form.” (I/1, p157)
Barth’s intention is to leave space for proclamation. Were a homoousios to be
pronounced on the verbal form of the Bible just as it is upon Christ,
then, come Sunday morning, we would have no right to speak in the name of
God any other words than those written in the Bible. Yet the homoousios has been
pronounced upon the Person of Christ and these texts are tied to
Him and “we are tied to these texts.” Thus we can do nothing but be
biblical in our preaching of Christ.
However Christ can do more than be biblical. In His freedom, He can be sermonic and
speak again in a new verbal form which is different to the Scripture’s
verbal form but that is nonetheless a divine Word. Again we see that God’s freedom is
not, for Barth, a-topic independence but essentially grounded in the
threefold dynamic.
The personality of God’s Word
As noted above, since God’s
Word is Jesus Christ, revelation is inherently personal, it is Dei
loquentis persona. This is “a
real and effective barrier” against any reduction of Scripture’s witness
to “a fixed total of revealed propositions to be systematised like the
sections of a corpus of law.” This will have important consequences
for the structure of the sermon.
The power of God’s Word
“The speech of God is the
action of God upon those to whom He speaks… we come under a Lordship.” Before speech-act philosophy was
popular, Barth was well aware of Scripture’s depiction of God’s Word as
God’s act. Yet Barth was adamant that this is not
a property inherent in language. Our language is a very poor
example of effecting what we speak. As opposed to the ‘theology from
below’ proposed by some speech-act enthusiasts,
God’s Word “makes history”
because, unlike with our own words, He is personally present in and with
His Word with living, lordly power.
“The
power of the Word of God in itself and as such is absolute power… All
this must be asserted of the Word of God, because the Word of God is not
distinct from Jesus Christ, and because consequently its effect is not
different from the lordship of Jesus Christ. To hear the Word of God is to be drawn into the sphere of
the real power of this lordship.” (I/1, p174)
The Word therefore claims its
hearers with all the authority of Christ.
“The claim of the Word of God is as such not a
wish or a behest which, so to speak, remained external to the hearer,
which did not touch his existence, but it is the claiming, the
commandeering of the man; whatever his attitude personally to the claim
of God, as a hearer of His Word the man finds that he has become one
claimed by God.” (I/1, p173)
In this, Barth uses a
comparison with baptism.
“Therefore as the sign of this real supreme
power of the Word of God, baptism is instituted. It declares, as being on its part real
action upon man and power of disposal over him, that he stands, prior to
all his experiences and decisions, within the sphere of Christ’s
lordship. Long before he can
adopt an attitude to God, God has adopted an attitude to him. Whatever
attitude he may take it will take place within and on the ground of the
attitude taken towards him by God.
If he comes to faith, that will be but confirmation of the fact
that he does possess God’s promise, that he is claimed, judged, and
blessed by God. If he does not
come to faith, neither will that be a possibility he was free to
choose. He will sin against God’s
Word. He will display himself,
certainly not a free man but as unfree.
He will not choose, he will be rejected. It is not a possibility but the impossibility that he will
grasp. In a word, he will, even
in his very unbelief, be measured by the Word of God, touched by its
power. It is just God’s previous
attitude towards him that will constitute his unbelief unbelief, his sin
sin. Only in the realm of grace,
and there for the first time, is there faith and unbelief, righteousness
and sin. Only through the power
of the Word of God and through it for the first time are found the two
categories, those that are saved and those that are lost.” (I/1, 175)
In baptism a person is placed
“within the sphere of Christ’s lordship,” and God’s prior, covenanted
attitude to them is pronounced long before they have adopted an attitude
to Him. Just so, in preaching our congregations are summoned and claimed
by Christ whatever their current attitude to Him may be. This “realm of grace” created by
preaching does not rule out the response of unbelief or sin but rather it
constitutes it as the “impossible” yet actual and concrete rejections of
the “absolute power” of the Word.
For
Barth, the powerful, resurrecting Word of grace is really addressed to
all and in that context is our election or rejection decided. Without this Word to us we would be
lost for there is no way from us to God, yet by His Word He has made a
way to us. We are not fitted for
such an encounter and have no aptitude or capacity for hearing this Word,
yet in the miraculous confrontation of the Word we are addressed
personally. God, in His sovereign
election, has decided to effect who we are in our encounter with
this Word. We are not ‘self-made
men’ (“Only God can judge me.
Thus I am altogether the man I am in virtue of God’s decision”,
I/1, 184). The rejected are not
left to themselves, they too are comprehended in this divine decision for
election. Yet they are
comprehended as those who (somehow!) contradict the divine decision. We all have our “peculiar and
essential quality” (ibid) only in the context of this Word. Our decision, which is a real and
“extremely responsible decision” (ibid) is to exist either in
obedience or in contradiction to this Word. Even the rejected exist within this summons to faith. They have chosen the impossible
possibility which was a choice excluded by God. Nonetheless this Word of
grace, which comes to all, constitutes both believers and unbelievers as
the men they are. It is a free,
divine, personal and effective decision.
The keys of the kingdom are
truly in the hands of the apostolic preacher as God effects His electing
purpose through the Word proclaimed today.
Critique
Is
Barth right to say that the Biblical text is tied to Christ but not
Christ to the text?
Again we must stress that
Barth’s concept of freedom is not an attempt to cut God loose from the
world but one that seeks to honour the unique actualisation of God’s
freedom in Christ. Neither
is he seeking to compromise the trustworthiness of Scripture. The issue is not whether to
believe the Bible but on what grounds we do so. Barth wants to ground our trust in the
living Speaker of the text. To
lay hold of Christ (which is always in fact His laying hold of us) is to
infallibly lay hold of God. Yet
to lay hold of the words on the page, considered apart from their
animation by the Spirit and therefore their active communication of
Christ Himself, is to search the Scriptures in vain. (John 5:39-40)
Having said this, we do wish
that he expressed more of the continual witness of the Scriptures
(as with T.F. Torrance) rather than the “where and when” eventism
discussed in the last section. In
that way Barth would be saved from sounding as though Christ is cut loose
from the Bible apart from odd events when and where He chooses. Yet such a caricature could never be
Barth’s ultimate view of revelation in the Scriptures. Given that Barth
is such a theologian of revelation and yet so “tied to these texts”,
given that he is so Scripture bound and yet emphatically not apophatic,
given that he subjects concepts of God’s freedom as caprice to searching
criticism, we seriously doubt whether Barth has cut the tie between
Christ and the Bible.
Yet to bring out his concerns
more consistently and biblically, we prefer Torrance’s conception which
honours the asymmetry of Christ’s relationship to the Bible but still maintains
a perpetual link. This is
something like the asymmetry of the Lord’s Supper in which the elements
ever become their spiritual realities yet not ex opere operato but
through the gracious activity of the Spirit.
In
the realm of sacramental theology we are accustomed to this asymmetry
(I/1, p98-99). We do not believe
in transubstantiation and yet we trust in the real presence of the Lord
Jesus in the Supper. Christ is not
automatically delivered into our hands because of the sacramental act,
but He is encountered spiritually (but no less really) when, through the
act, He is trusted. We do
not bring Jesus down from heaven through our actions – there is no ex
opere operato. Rather,
through the visible words, the Spirit unites us to Christ. The link between the bread and
Christ’s body is real but is established entirely from His side –
an asymmetrical relationship. So
too for Barth, this asymmetry applies to Scripture and to preaching.
Christ is really present in
His Word, yet there is no ex opere operato of the pulpit. This link ought to be conceived as an
arrow continually coming down from Christ through the
Scriptures proclaimed to us.
Revelation is grace.
Does Barth have room for human response?
Barth believes that preaching delivers its
hearers into the “realm of grace” just as baptism brings even a child
incapable of response
into the covenant community. This is a necessary consequence of the
Word’s divine character. Barth cannot conceive of the Word going forth
and not ruling with absolute power.
Therefore he says:
“The claim of the Word of God is as such not a wish or a behest
which, so to speak, remained external to the hearer, which did not touch
his existence, but it is the claiming, the commandeering of the man;
whatever his attitude personally to the claim of God, as a hearer of His
Word the man finds that he has become one claimed by God.”
Since we are addressing those claimed already
by God, we are to preach Scripture’s promises as those already fulfilled and
guaranteed by Christ, its punishments as those already taken and
satisfied by Christ, its blessings as those already secured and ours in
Christ. The preacher therefore is to declare
them as already true “in such a way that [the congregation] come to see
its crucial application to them.”
In all this Barth is aware that rejection of
the Word is possible. Indeed he
is aware that such rejection means that the saving benefits of the Word
are foregone. In perhaps his most
famous sermon (Saved by Grace), Barth says this:
“By grace you have been saved! – this is
true, even though we may not believe it, may not accept it as valid for
ourselves and unfortunately in doing so may forego its benefits.”
Here we have an unresolved tension in Barth’s
teaching and preaching:
“You really are saved”
ó “Accept it or forego it.”
The first statement seeks to uphold the Word’s
lordly power to rule and Christ’s finished work, the second honours the
particular other-ness of the hearer who has a genuine history and
responsibility before and under the Word. In Barth’s preaching this tension is held in balance.
Certainly in the 30
sermons we have in English (Deliverance to the Captives and Call
for God) there is no preaching of universal salvation. This is in line with Barth’s teaching
that the Church “should not preach an apokatastasis.” (from II/2,
p477, quoted in Busch, The Great Passion, p286). Yet for Barth’s frustrating ambiguity
on the matter see ibid, p214-218.
In his Dogmatics, Barth also seeks to
maintain the tension. Yet whatever “universalistic leanings”
there may be in Barth they find their root in his modalistic leanings.
This is so since the minimization of otherness
within the Godhead corresponds to a minimization of otherness in the
creaturely realm. Response is not
a category Barth seems to recognize in eternity. His view of God’s oneness seems to
preclude the idea of reciprocal relations among the Persons. Correspondingly, response to the Word
from our side has little place in Barth’s thinking.
We note that Barth
considers the triunity of God (almost exclusively) in terms of His out-goingness
– Revealer, Revelation and Revealedness.
God as Hearer of His Word – as enjoying Subject-Object
relations within His triune life – is virtually absent. Though note I/1, p158: “He is already
an object to Himself.” Such
comments are rare. Far more
prominent is his teaching that the three Persons (or modes!) are three
repetitions of one divine Subject.
Barth rejects the Father-Son covenant of redemption
in eternity precisely because it posits a genuine response to God’s Word
rather than a mere repetition of it in another mode. Yet if genuine response is not even a
divine possibility, it would be rare for Barth to posit a human freedom
above that of God’s! Therefore the modalistic leaning is attended with
the universalistic one. Though
Barth is generally Scriptural enough to avoid the worst of these errors,
we should be aware of them so that we can read him more carefully.
Application
to Preaching
For
what do we aim in preaching?
We aim at nothing less and nothing other than
God’s own aim which is that His Word would come home to His people with
all its active, personal power.
As Barth says, “Right hearing of God’s Word is the only valid
effect of the sermon.” Barth is not concerned to create a
congregation of activists, for God’s Word is the great act and He is the
great Actor. We honour true
activism (i.e. God’s) when we cease all ours and simply listen. Encountering God in His Word is not a
preliminary stage in our spiritual growth or a means towards some further
end. It is the summum bonum of the Christian life and so of
preaching too. The preaching
greats would agree:
Martin Luther: “Christ [ought] to be preached
to the end that faith in Him may be established, that He may not only be Christ,
but be Christ for you and me.”
Yet, of course, the power enabling this right
hearing is in God’s powerful Word and not in our rhetorical skill. At the decisive point, and especially
here, we acknowledge that we cannot do what must be done – to “mediate”
this encounter. Yet Barth has
confidence that God’s own Word, which inherently aims at man, will hit
its target.
For this reason Barth’s prayers before and
after his sermons entreat the Father to: “Come… Awaken us all… Grant us
thy light!… Speak…”
“Show us… Open our hearts and we shall grasp…”
“Make us free to believe.” His requests are for illumination –
that we might see and hear what is most true about Christ and
ourselves. In the context of this
prayerful work, Barth joins the witness of the Word and aims at God’s own
intention, the hearer’s apprehension of the gospel as not only true,
but true for you and me.
“I would like to state it in very personal
terms. He stands by you – and by you – and by you! When I point my finger at you, each one
must know that he is personally addressed. Yes, he stands by you!”
Where “application” for many evangelical
preachers means an exhortation to ‘pray, read the Bible and evangelise,’ (often
only loosely related to the text), for Barth the application is to
believe the Word.
This is typical of how Barth closes many of his prison sermons: “I
come to a close with a word of advice or a request: How would it be, if
we – each man and woman among us – tonight, before we went to sleep, were
to say once more to God, aloud or softly, what we have just heard now:
‘My time is secure in your hands’?… And how would it be if tomorrow
morning, when we awaken, we were to say, again aloud or softly, exactly
the same thing: ‘My time is in your hands’?” Call for God, p46.
More concretely, Barth’s aim is that his
hearers believe that they are addressed by this Word – that it
holds true also for them. Yet,
even this is impossible for us and so we pray, repeatedly, that God would
grant us the power to know in our hearts the truth of the gospel.
“Why should we
want to forego the benefits [of being saved by grace]? Why should
we not want to believe? Why
do we not go out through the open door?
Why do we not open our clenched fists? Why do we
obstruct our ears? Why are
we blindfolded? Honestly why?
One remark must suffice.
All this is so because perhaps we failed to pray fervently enough
for a change within ourselves, on our part… to believe, to accept, to let
it be true for us, to begin to live with this truth, to believe it not
only with our minds and with our lips, but also with our hearts and with
all our life, so that our fellowmen may sense it, and finally to let our
total existence be immersed in the great divine truth, by grace you
have been saved, this is the concern of our prayers. No human being
has ever prayed for this in vain… Ask that you may believe this and it
will be given you; seek this, and you will find; knock on this door, and
it will be opened to you.” Ibid, p40-41, italics his.
See also: “it does not happen at will that we
are able to remember the Lord. Nothing will come of it unless he himself
gives us power to remember him… we must pray that he grants us this
power… the Lord our God has never failed anyone who prayed for power and
strength to remember him. Amen.” ibid, p116
In all this it will be noted how organically
explanation and application are united in Barth’s thinking. The application of the text is the
lively and repeated presentation of the Word to the heart of the
congregation to the end that it might be believed. The evangelical preacher ought
to know that the right response to the gospel is faith. Right application is therefore to
exhort belief. Application
is explanation made personal.
For many, the explanatory section represents an
arrow coming down as we are instructed in the Word. The application section then
represents the arrow going up and out as we are exhorted to an active
response. Yet for Barth, although
explanation and application are both necessary to the sermon, they
are not distinguishable stages in preaching. In both the arrow comes down as the good news is
heralded from on high.
Application (if it is to be distinguished at all from explanation)
is the pointed coming home of the Word to the listener’s heart. All this stands in contrast to a
common understanding of application today. This understanding is that application involves the
derivation of principles from the text which can then be turned into
moral instruction.
Such an understanding
has a long history. It became a
technique honed to precision by Puritans like William Perkins. He spoke of seven categories of
hearers to which a doctrine may be applied – to each the application will
be different. In addition there are two broad
categories of application, one mental (which really amounts to doctrinal
correctness), the other practical. The “suitably gifted” preacher will be
able to apply the doctrines garnered from the text to “the life and
practice of the congregation”
usually in very detailed ways.
This application was a discrete stage of the sermon following on
from the explanation section and the doctrinal section. To fail to apply the text in this
sense was considered at the very least inadequate, more typically it was
thought sinful.
Interestingly, Barth himself
imagines a situation in which a Sunday worshipper hears the sermon but
receives no applied instruction.
Such a person asks: “To all these words what corresponds in
reality?” Barth concludes
that such a person has not even begun to hear the Word, for, as we have
seen, God’s Word is God’s act.
“The man who hears God speak and can still
inquire about the act corresponding, would simply show thereby that he actually
has not heard God speak. We
might, for example, hear Christian sermons preached and ask ourselves:
What happens in virtue of the fact that this thing happens? To all these words what corresponds in
reality? A question that most
certainly needs raising! We might
listen to Holy Scripture and hear only words, a man’s words, which we do
or do not understand, but along with which invariably the corresponding
event is still wanting. It is
then sure that in the proclamation as in the Bible what we heard was not
the Word of God. Had it been the Word of God, we would never have been
looking around for God’s acts.
The Word of God itself would have been the act. The Word of God needs no supplementing
by the act. The Word of God is
itself the act of God… The Word of God in the highest sense makes
history.”
There is no discrete second
stage in revelation: “The Word of God needs no supplementing by the act.” What is needed is not more gifted
exegesis of the congregation and their pastoral needs. What is needed is what John Wesley
wrote in his diary regarding an open-air sermon in 1753: “God himself
made the application. Truly God
preached to their hearts.”
Application does not make preaching live. The
Spirit makes preaching live since He drives home the inherently active
Word and not merely with seven-fold precision but with personal, lordly
authority. We must ask therefore whether our
‘applications’ are in keeping with God’s own intentions for the proclaimed
Word. Are we clear that the
fundamental thing our congregations must do with the gospel is believe
it? How should this shape our
view of ‘applying the text’?
The divine initiative in preaching.
If God’s Word proclaimed is
fundamentally a divine act, it is worth considering whether current
evangelical thought and practice concerns itself too much with the task
‘from below’. Interestingly, when David Jackman quoted Barth at the
E.M.A., 2006
he quoted only half of Barth’s definition of preaching – the human side
of it.
Jackman only gives the second half of this
definition.
Yet Barth begins with God’s
free approach to us for a reason – a gospel reason: revelation is
grace.
The Proclamation Trust says
that its foundational belief is that “When God’s Word is taught, God’s
voice is heard.” This is true. Yet more foundational is the truth that
God is a speaking God who is willing and able, of His own free grace and
power, Himself to proclaim Christ in the Scriptures and
preaching. This truth should come
first. We must never give either
ourselves or our hearers the impression that the initiative in this
revealing work is ours. This is
the danger with beginning, “When the Bible is taught…” An ex opere operato of the
pulpit is a very distinct possibility and one that is experienced by many
congregations on a Sunday.
We
must remind ourselves constantly of the divine initiative in
preaching. Our temptation is
always to absolutize the means of grace.
We look no further than these means, whether those means are communion,
‘worship’ or preaching. In this
way they become not means but ends in themselves, and not grace (i.e. His
initiative) but works (i.e. ours!).
So
the stereo-typical catholic sees the eucharist not as a means of God’s
encounter with man but rather the moment in which we make God
manifest. When the ritual is
performed well/reverently/at all, Christ’s presence is enjoyed. Christ is
not present through the sacrament but rather the performance of
the mass is Christ’s presence. “When the bread is broken, Christ
is present.” Very quickly the
mass becomes the point. The
stereo-typical charismatic views ‘singing… spiritual songs’ in the midst
of the congregation not as a means of grace but as the time when ‘God’s
in the house’. “When the band are
playing well, God shows up.” God
then is not present in and through ‘worship’ but ‘worship’
is equated with the divine presence.
Worship becomes the point.
The stereo-typical evangelical views preaching of the word of God
not as a means of grace but as the hearing of God’s voice
itself. ‘When God’s word is
taught, God’s voice is heard.’ To
simply expound a biblical passage or theme (correctly) is itself
the encounter with God. Preaching
becomes the point.
Yet
surely, Christ is the point. And
the Lord’s supper and worship and preaching are ways that Jesus
can and does make Himself known to us, among us and in us. Yet He will not be brought down by our
performance of these acts. They
are His means (note means) of grace (note: grace!). He always remains free in His
self-giving – in the bread, in our corporate life, in His word. That’s why it’s often great to hear a
catholic preaching well, or an evangelical leading ‘worship’ or a
charismatic presiding at the Lord’s table. For then, they are less tempted to see the simple operation
of this act as the point but as a means of making Christ known – He is
the point.
The only cure for such preaching is a robust theology of the
Word’s own powerful approach to us.
Preaching is a means of grace. Both terms should challenge us. It is a means – it is never the end,
nor is it the beginning. The
beginning and end is Christ. It
is grace – it is never our work to bring Christ down. He approaches us. Barth helps us here.
SECTION 3
The Word’s nature:
God’s
speech as self-authenticating address
Exploration
“What God utters is never in any way
known and true in abstraction from God Himself. It is known and true for no other reason than that He
Himself says it, that He in person is in and accompanies what is said by
Him.”
This is yet another
consequence of Barth’s insistence that revelation is the free activity of
the triune God. If God is known
only through God and by God then His revelation comes to us only
through Christ and by the Spirit and only from His free initiative. Thus knowledge of God happens by grace
alone, through faith alone and in Christ alone. Additionally, given Barth’s threefold account of the Word,
this guarantees ‘Scripture alone’ as well.
Since this is so, Barth
considers the attempt to build on a supposed natural knowledge towards a
knowledge of God as a betrayal of the gospel. Just as in the realm of justification
we must reject both the Pelagian error of a natural approach to God and
the semi-Pelagian error of a synergistic approach, so in knowledge of God
we must reject both a theologia
naturalis vulgaris and Brunner’s more modest suggestion of recovering
a true natural theology.
Barth emphatically rejects a
natural capacity in humanity even to receive revelation.
Brunner
had attempted to posit this by distinguishing between the material imago
Dei which is entirely lost and the formal imago which
remains. The formal image means
that man remains man and can at least be addressed. Barth is highly suspicious of this
move. With typical ascerbic wit he points out that if this is all that is
intended by Brunner, it simply reduces to the statement: “man is man and
not a tortoise.” (ibid, p79).
For this distinction to be helpful to Brunner in pursuing ‘the
other task,’ this formal image would have to contribute something from
man’s end. Barth continues: “What
is the relevance of the “capacity for revelation” to the fact that man is
man? The impression given by Brunner’s essay has been described roughly
like this. If a man had just been saved from drowning by a competent
swimmer, would it not be very unsuitable if he proclaimed the fact that
he was a man and not a lump of lead as his “capacity for being saved”?
Unless he could claim to have helped the man who saved him by a few
strokes or the like!” (ibid).
This last sentence reveals the nature of the debate. Either Brunner’s attempt is irrelevant
and so benign or it seeks to be decisive and becomes malignant.
We must be born again to see
the kingdom, and such rebirth comes only through the Word. The fact that God does make
contact with us is the miracle of revelation and never to be confused
with a natural capacity of our own.
“The Holy Ghost, who proceeds from the Father
and the Son and is therefore revealed and believed to be God, does not
stand in need of any point of contact but that which he himself creates.
Only retrospectively is it possible to reflect on the way in which he
“makes contact” with man, and this retrospect will ever be a retrospect
upon a miracle.”
Thus preaching must not seek
to exploit a point of contact in the listeners but rather the proclaimed
Word is itself the point of contact. For this reason Barth says:
“I have the impression
that my sermons reach and “interest” my audience most when I least rely
on anything to “correspond” to the Word of God already “being there,”
when I least rely on the “possibility” of proclaiming this Word, when I
least rely on my ability to “reach” people by my rhetoric, when on the
contrary I allow my language to
be formed and shaped and adapted as much as possible by what the text
seems to be saying.”
In this, Barth reveals that
he does indeed care for his audience.
Brunner had hoped that his apologetic approach was more “ad
hominem”. Yet Barth believes the Word to be already
a purposive Word directed towards and good for man since,
essentially, it is the Word of Immanuel, God with us. Just as Christ has assumed flesh to
Himself indivisibly and inseparably, so His Word is inextricably a Word
with and for man. We cannot
conceive of a bare, naked Word but only a divine-human Word – in
fact, a divinely humanitarian Word. To proclaim the Word by itself and on
its own terms means, necessarily, to be ad hominem. As Barth counsels in Homiletics:
“The
real need is not so much to get to the people as to come from Christ.
Then one automatically gets to the people.”
Critique
Does Barth give us any way of
addressing the culture?
David Buttrick is deeply disturbed by Barth’s insistence that
“Pastors… aim their guns beyond the hills of relevance.” Writing in the early ’90s he asks
incredulously, “are we willing to tell Allan Boesak or Bishop Tutu to
stop referring to apartheid in preaching?” It seems almost certain that Barth
would tell them exactly that.
Barth was insistent, even in the midst of Nazi Germany, that
theologians and pastors continue their work ‘as though nothing had
happened’.
In
the mid 30’s a young pastor from Brandenburg wrote to Barth after being
removed from his post for preaching against Hitler. Barth wrote back telling him he had
made a “decisive mistake” in forsaking the purpose of the sermon –
exposition of Scripture. “Your job, when you stand in the pulpit, is to
again make well the sick church of Germany. That can be done only by the Word alone. You are to serve that Word and no
other. But you can’t do that if
you seize on Mein Kampf… Was it not a shame, each minute that you
wasted with this book instead of reading the Bible?”
We
may be astonished at this response but we must be aware that Barth does
not decry “relevance” from the comfort of some “holy huddle.” His Homiletics was delivered as
lectures in Bonn in 1933 while under surveillance by the Nazis. At the end of this lecture course he
was removed back to Switzerland. Barth proved a political threat
precisely because he concerned himself with the Word alone.
This
was supremely the case when Barth drafted the Barmen Declaration.
The confession is fundamentally a rejection of
natural theology and a determination to view the whole of the Church’s
mission as Gospel proclamation.
Yet, it proved a deeply provocative political challenge precisely
because it refused to engage with the culture on its own terms. The Nazis are confronted because the
Confessing Church occupies itself with its one true Fuhrer (Christ), its
one true Reich (God’s Kingdom) and its one true commission: delivering
“the message of the free grace of God”.
This single-minded determination to let the Gospel set the agenda
for the Church brings it into its most significant contact with the
surrounding culture.
Does Barth give us any way of addressing the
non-Christian?
Paul Tillich saw in Barth a
“demonic absolutism which throws the truth like stones at the heads of
people, not caring whether they can accept it or not.” Yet Barth’s “care” for the outsider
was expressed precisely in not stepping outside “the closed
circle” of
Christian discourse. Only from within
the Strange New World of the Bible can we address the
unbeliever, lest we betray by our ‘bridge-building’ what our foundations
are.
“In my experience the best way of dealing with
“unbelievers” and modern youth is not to try to bring out their
“capacity for revelation,” but to treat them quietly, simply (remembering
that Christ has died and risen also for them), as if their rejection of
”Christianity” was not to be taken seriously. It is only then that they
can understand you, since they really see you where you maintain that you
are standing as an evangelical theologian: on the ground of justification
by faith alone.”
We must not pursue but rather
fear the prospect of making the gospel seem reasonable.
“[Apologetics means] the domesticating of
revelation… the process of making the Gospel respectable. When the Gospel is offered to man, and
he stretches out his hand to receive it and takes it into his hand, an
acute danger arises which is greater than the danger that he may not
understand it and angrily reject it.
The danger is that he may accept it and peacefully and at once
make himself its lord and possessor, thus rendering it innocuous, making
that which chooses him something which he himself has chosen, which
therefore comes to stand as such alongside all the other things that he
can also choose, and therefore control.”
If the gospel makes sense to
the ‘enquirer’ on any grounds other than its own divine self-attestation,
then the enquirer has not been confronted by God’s contradicting
Lordship. Instead – the opposite
– they act as lords and possessors of the gospel. We can, and certainly must, address
the non-Christian but we do so not by altering where we stand but
by praying that the Spirit through His Word would alter where they stand.
Application to Preaching
It is not the preacher’s job to make
the Word relevant
In, I Believe in Preaching, John Stott conceives of
“Preaching as Bridge-Building”
that surmounts the “Cultural Gulf.” He is highly critical of preaching
that “fails to build a bridge into the modern world. [Such preaching] is biblical but not
contemporary.” He goes on to assert: “it would be
quite inadmissable to use the perpetual relevance of the gospel and the
up-to-date ministry of the Holy Spirit as an excuse for avoiding the
communication problem.” Instead, it is clear that Stott
considers preachers themselves to be the solution to the communication
problem: “Our task is to enable God’s revealed truth to
flow out of the Scriptures into the lives of the men and women of today.” In the light of the “yawning chasm”
between the Bible’s context and our own, our prayer should be “that God
will raise up a new generation of Christian communicators who are
determined to bridge the chasm.”
Ironically, Stott cites Barth
as an example of the sort of preaching which is concerned to build such
bridges! Yet we must protest. The fact that Barth mentions
“the problem of human life on the one hand and the content of the Bible
on the other”
does not suggest that Barth saw himself as the
bridge-builder. Barth is an
example of someone who “inadmissably” (according to Stott) declared the
communication problem solved by the Word itself. He refused to see the office of
preacher as standing in the gap and “enabling” God’s truth to be relevant
to the world.
“we
are certainly not ministers of the Word if we feel ourselves called to be
benevolent protectors, or big-hearted friends or representatives of whom
the Word of God has need.”
Barth could not have made the
distinction Stott makes when he says, “[Such preaching] is biblical but
not contemporary.”
Again, just as Barth refused to see two discrete stages between
exposition and application, so here he saves us again from a false
dichotomy between biblical faithfulness and contemporary relevance. The Strange New World of the Bible may
indeed be strange to what Stott calls “the real world”
but it is always contemporary – ever ‘new.’ Thus Greg Haslam’s reversal of Stott’s concern is half
right:
“The
preacher’s task is no less than one of making the modern world relevant
to the Bible.”
Barth may agree with the
second half of the sentence, yet surely we must say that God’s Word by
the Spirit, takes on this task Himself.
Spirit-illumined Biblical preaching is a contemporary
message because in it the living Christ is revealed. When we have this perspective we will
be relevant in the only truly significant sense.
It is not the preacher’s task to make the Word
appear reasonable
As a
common example of such practice we note the readiness of many evangelical
preachers to ‘detour’ for five minutes or more on the subject of ‘the reasonableness
of believing in miracles’. They
claim to do so because the subject has ‘arisen from the text’. This is not at all the case. The text simply proclaims the
miracle. The preacher does not
follow suit. His detour arises, not, as he claims, because of the doubts
of the listener, but because of his own.
He doubts the most fundamental miracle – the miracle that
under-girds and justifies all his preaching. He doubts that the Word can defend itself. He rushes to its aid, bringing to bear
his finest powers of argumentation: refutations of Hume, illustrations
from experience, quotations from CS Lewis etc. All the while he demonstrates in the
plainest way possible his unbelief in the miraculous power of God. God Himself authenticates His
Word. He bridges the
hermeneutical gap, the historical gap, the credulity gap. He makes His Word alive in the ears
and minds and hearts of the hearers. The Word of Christ that raised
Lazarus does not need to be guarded around with qualifications or propped
up with further justifications.
It needs to be allowed free course to do its work. Then, by its own power, it becomes not
only credulous but living reality – something the preacher’s arguments
can never achieve. Spurgeon’s
word on such apologetics remains the best:
“The
Bible is like a lion. Whoever heard of defending a lion? Just turn it
loose, it will defend itself.”
Straightforward exposition
It would be difficult to
conceive of a less adorned preaching style than the one espoused by Barth
in Homiletics. Sermons
must have no introduction since these waste time, frustrate the hearers
and are an attempt to find a “point of contact.”
“The theological damage of sermon introductions is in
any event incredibly extensive… For what do they really involve at
root? Nothing other than the
search for a point of contact, for an analogue in us which can be a point
of entry for the Word of God. It
is believed that this little door to the inner self must first be found
and opened before it is worthwhile to bring the message. No! This is plain heresy…. We have
simply to approach people knowing that there is nothing in them that we
can address, no humanum, no analogia entis of any kind that
we can put in touch with the divinum, but only the one great
possibility which has no need of our skills, which alone is efficacious,
and which does not need us as advocates… We have simply to assume the
attitude of a messenger who has something to say. We have no need to build a slowly
ascending ramp, for there is no height that we have to reach. No!
Something has to come down from above. And this can happen only when the Bible speaks from the
very outset.” (Homiletics, p124-125)
“From the very first sentence,
preaching must be an address to the people with central communication out
of the text.” In general Barth’s sermons do simply
start with exposition. On the
rare occasion Barth begins with a contemporary example of something in
the text, it is only to clear away misunderstanding that such an analogy
really holds.
So when Barth preaches
“Before the judgement seat of Christ” he speaks of his own brush with the
law, being removed from Germany in 1933.
He refers also to the court-rooms that the in-mates would have
been familiar with. Yet all this
is simply to clear the ground for this: “How trivial all that is, almost
laughable, how it pales into insignificance compared with what is
declared to us by the Apostle Paul here in our text: ‘We must all be
shown up before the judgement seat of Christ.’” Call for God,
p88-89.
Just as Barth begins his
sermons with exposition, he ends them when his exposition finishes. He thus warns us away from a
conclusion also. This is linked
to Barth’s consideration of the proper application of a sermon
(considered in the last chapter).
If “right hearing” is the only valid effect of the sermon we
betray its nature if we adjoin practical exhortation. In his prison sermons, he generally
keeps to this,
though it should be noted that Barth considered his written opening and
closing prayers to be as much a part of the proclamation as the
exposition.
The body of the sermon must
be an exposition of a biblical text.
Thematic preaching is not to be encouraged,
it does not even qualify as a sermon as such.
“We
cannot view an address on a theme as having the same rank as a sermon on
a text (a homily). In the church we do not have authority to deal with
Christian principles or other themes.
We have to listen to what is said to the church to found and edify
it. No path in the church leads past God’s Word… Scripture should purge
all our own opinions, desires and thoughts.” Ibid, p95.
This rejection of theme-based
preaching flows out of the doctrine of the threefold Word. Precisely because Christ demands to be
proclaimed via the witness of the Scriptures we must resist the urge to
re-configure this witness according to our own pre-determined plans. The God-given witness of Scripture
should not be remade in our image.
To help us to remain on the biblical path, lectionary preaching is
helpful though not necessary
and sermon series’ on biblical books are excellent.
Barth regards preaching on
short texts as a danger since the terms are vulnerable to foreign
interpretation rather than “the divinely given scriptural context.”
However, in his prison sermons Barth breaks his own rule by preaching on
single verses. His stated aim in
this is so that the “word of the Bible should stick in your minds and
stay with you afterwards rather than my sermon.”
Barth is emphatically against
points to his sermons. This is a
direct implication of the fact that the Word is ultimately a Person and
the Scriptures inherently a witness to Him.
“Again the personality of
the Word of God signifies, not any diminution of its verbal character,
but the sheerly active obstacle to reducing its verbal form to a human
system, i.e. to using its verbal form to lay the foundation and raise the
structure of a human system. It
would not be the faithfulness but the unfaithfulness of God to us if He
allowed us to make such use of His Word.
That would mean that He allowed us to gain power over His Word, to
take it under our own charge, and thereby to shut ourselves up against
Himself, to our own hurt. God’s
faithfulness to His Church consists in Him making use of His freedom to
come to us in His Word, and in reserving to Himself the freedom to do
this again and again.” I/1, p157-158.
The theme of the Bible
is Christ and the text of Scripture presents us with a ‘way of witness’
or a ‘train of thought’ which points to Him. “To preach is to tread again with the
congregation the way of witness taken by the text.” Thus, “our task is simply to follow
the distinctive movement of thought in the text, to stay with this, and
not with a plan that arises out of it.” Barth is even suspicious of sermon
titles since they may provide an artificial unity to the sermon which
does not arise from the text itself.
In terms of manner, one might
have supposed Barth to be uninterested in the personality of the preacher
given his strong views on the divine nature of his Word. Yet Barth’s Antiochene bent makes him
stress the humanity of all three forms of the Word. Thus preachers are ‘to be themselves’
in the pulpit. They are first to be hearers of the
Word, they
are always to be lovers of their congregation
and they ought to be plain and simple in their delivery.
In passing we also note that
Barth was adamant that the text of the sermon must be written, word
for word, along with the opening and closing prayers. He also calls for great caution over
illustrations: “in no circumstances should we hunt around for these.”
When we take Barth’s
stipulations here together with the rejection of any additional application,
apologetics or social comment we are presented with one of the most
conservative homiletics ever conceived.
Barth’s advice appears scandalously conservative even
to evangelicals. To the more
liberal David Buttrick, it is unthinkable: “Barth in some ways all but destroyed preaching in the name
of the Bible. He threw out sermon introductions because they might imply
some “point of contact,” some natural affinity for the gospel in the
human sphere; and he lopped off conclusions because they might express
works-righteousness. Above all,
he denied social relevance: “The Preacher,” he wrote, “must preach the
Bible and nothing else.” As a
result, preaching became for Barth the reiteration of a biblical text…
without much reference to the social world.”
While we may query the
strictness of some of these regulations, (against which the prophets and
apostles would often fair poorly!) we find ourselves scrutinized by Barth
at the decisive points: ‘How committed to Scripture will I be?’ ‘Do I
truly believe that this is God’s Word I speak, which He will
illumine and enliven?’, ‘Do I believe in the Holy Spirit?’ and ‘How
faithfully am I acting as a transparent witness to Christ?’
To preach like this requires
tremendous faith in the power of the Word. If Barth’s advice is followed, the preacher is left
completely vulnerable in the pulpit.
Pithy social commentary, persuasive argumentation, engaging
illustrations and rhetorical flourish are all stripped back. Only the Word Himself in resurrection
power can make the sermon live.
“Only
God can talk about God. To this
extent, in appropriate application of a christological formulation, we
might say of preaching as the Word of God that it is ‘conceived by the
Holy Ghost.’”
“It
is not in our power that our human word should become God’s Word.
Preaching, then, must become prayer.”
Yet here in our total vulnerability, the Word of the cross is
declared and the power of God made manifest.
“For what we proclaim
is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your
servants for Jesus' sake. 6 For God, who said,
"Let light shine out of darkness," has shone in our hearts to
give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ. 7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show
that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” (2 Cor. 4:5-7)
CONCLUSION
We began our study with Barth’s question: not how does one,
but how can one preach? In contrast to so much homiletic
theory which begins from below, Barth determines to “begin at the
beginning”
– with the God who has declared Himself in His Word, the Lord
Jesus.
Barth’s concern with the ‘How can’ of preaching is, for
him, the very centre of his theology. The
possibility for preaching lies not in any human potential, be it a
philosophy of language or “point of contact”. Rather the possibility and initiative always lies with the
self-revealing, triune God of the Scriptures.
Yet once this ‘How can’ is understood, the essence of ‘How to’
has already been grasped.
Proclamation, by its very nature, must be a Scriptural witness to
Christ that is grounded in God’s own freedom and authority. The evangelical preacher is thereby
released from the absurd task of either defending, furthering,
enlivening, making relevant or making manifest this divine Word. We do not stand in the gap, bridging
the “foul, wide ditch”
between text and congregation.
Neither do we stand in the way, obscuring a ‘purer’ revelation in
the Scriptures. Instead, in
Luther’s words, the Word Himself, with lordly power, “condescends to
enter the mouth of every Christian who professes the faith… [Therefore
preaching must be] believed as though God’s own voice were resounding
from heaven.”
We find that Barth answers the “How can” question, and does
so from God’s side. When
this is understood in its humbling enormity, we are propelled towards the
much more Biblical question: “How can we not preach?”
“Woe to me if I do not preach
the gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16);
“Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been
written, "I believed, and so I spoke," we also believe, and so
we also speak.” (2 Cor 4:13)
Hear a short sermon on
preaching here.
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