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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.
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