1. Language about God and Church Proclamation
With §3 Barth passes from “prolegomena” strictly to the first major chapter of The Doctrine of the Word of God, entitled The Word of God as the Criterion of Dogmatics. The intellectual material which dogmatics considers is Church Proclamation, and Barth must situate such proclamation in the wider discourse or language about God.
From the beginning, this seems to place Barth at a disadvantage: he wishes to emphasize the angular singularity of God’s grace, and instead now has to place his basic means –his language– in the context of wider discourse about God. This is perilous ground.
In the bold-face header to §3 Barth limits the danger by announcing his chief interest: “Talk about God in the Church seeks to be proclamation to the extent that in the form of preaching and sacrament it is directed to man with the claim and expectation that in accordance with its commission it has to speak to him the Word of God to be heard in faith.. (I/1/47)
But Barth then introduces a major concession:
Inasmuch as it is a human word in spite of this claim and expectation, it is the material of dogmatics, i.e., of the investigation of its responsibility as measured by the Word of God which it seeks to proclaim. (ibid.)
The first investigation into proclamation’s responsibility, then, is to situate itself in more general “language about God.”
Language about God is, first of all, in a fallen world. (ibid.) Some might object that immediately Barth is importing distinctly Christian theological concepts into a more general philosophical or linguistic discussion. Barth would, I think, reply that as a dogmatic theologian he has no choice but to retain his distinctive vantage point within the Church, and that all these concepts are so knit together that one could not but speak of Language after the Fall, or at any rate after the fact of sin (however it may be considered to come into the human realm). Thus “we stand under the sign of a decision constantly taken between the secularity and the sanctification of our existence, between sin and grace, between a being as man which forgets God, which is absolutely neutral in relation to Him and therefore absolutely hostile, and one which in His revelation is awakened by faith to being in the Church, to the appropriation of His promise.” (I/1/47-48). When the essence of the Church, Jesus Christ “as the acting person of God, sanctifies the being of man in the visible sphere of human occurrence as being in the Church, then He also sanctifies its talk as talk about God taking place in the Church.” (I/1/49).
Public worship, however is not all proclamation; there is, for example, confession, prayer, singing –the answer directed by humans to God as praise, repentance, and thanks. Neither is proclamation “church social work” (i.e. community service?), the instruction of youth (catechesis and youth ministry), or the discourse of theology, which is 3rd- or 4th-order language of reflection and critique.
The language about God to be found in the church claims itself to be proclamation where it is so directed that “it has to declare the Word of God” to humans. (I/1/51) Such proclamation is human language in and through which God Himself speaks, like a king through the mouth of his herald. (I/1/52). Such human language can become proclamation not by any logical process or material content, but only by God’s grace and human willingness to take up God’s commission, to be obedient. “God can speak His Word to man quite otherwise than through the talk about Himself that is to be found in the Church as known or as yet to be discovered, and therefore quite otherwise than through proclamation. He can establish the Church anew and directly when and where and how it pleases Him.” (I/1/54)
Therefore Church proclamation can never control the Word of God, never limit where and how it might be found, but on the other hand must stick to its own knitting: it cannot repeat what the “a pagan or an atheis” might say even though it might hear a divine Word of judgment or grace through such speech.(I/1/55) (One may note that “pagan or atheist” could be a not-so-coded reference to Facists and Communists in Europe ca. 1932.) The Church must stick to its commission to proclaim, through the means its knows: preaching; sacraments. This means that humans must re-interpret, repeat, and re-contextualize the Church’s proclamation, and can neither prove its commission nor its interpretation.
Our talk about God may intend to be proclamation in terms of our commission. It may intend to be preaching and sacrament according to the will and command of the Lord of the Church. But we shall not find comfort in our obedience or in the uprightness of our intention to obey. We shall find it only in the actual command that we have heard—a command which must in fact speak for itself if it is to be recognisable to others as such. (I/1/57)
The mere thought of God’s Word becoming revealed outside the Church it only possible for those who have previously recognized God’s Word proclaimed inside the Church. This requires a person to proclaim it, one who is enjoined to do so –a minister of Word and Sacrament. Barth then pursues a discussion of the one who receives such a commission, and how God’s word may be heard through that person despite human limitations (I/1/57-61).
Barth’s consideration of proclamation, preaching, sacrament, and ministry is an example of “evangelical dogmatics” which expounds these concepts: “As has been done, Evangelical dogmatics exegetes these concepts” (I/1/61 –see also the long excursus at the end of this section, I/1/70-71). Barth next contrasts his exposition (typically!) with modernist dogmatics on the one side, and Roman Catholic dogmatics, on the other (I/1/61-70).
Modernist dogmatics “is acquainted with the function specified but it is not aware of its essential distinctiveness (of proclamation and language about God) … when it rests on a commission to and for [humans].” (I/1/61) Modernist dogmatics does not consider that the human in relation to God must listen to God saying something of which the human is not yet aware and can in no sense say “to himself. Modernist thought hears man answer without any one having called him. It hears him talk to himself.” (ibid.) Barth’s picture of such preaching based on modernist dogmatics is scalding:
For it, therefore, proclamation is a necessary expression of the life of the human community known as the “Church,” an expression in which one man, in the name and for the spiritual advancement of a number of others, drawing from a treasure common to him and to them, offers, for the enrichment of this treasure, an interpretation of his own past and present as a witness to the reality alive in this group of [humans]” (ibid.)
All the concepts of language, word, proclamation, preaching will disappear in the general concept of operation or emotion made articulate, of “symbols” (I/1/63) “Why do I choose precisely these symbols?” (I/1/63)–and not rather be silent? Barth asks –reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s quite different “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen) the final statement of Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921).
On the other side, Roman Catholic dogmatics “dogmatics cannot emphasise strongly enough that the Church lives by and in this means of grace,” i.e. the sacrament.(I/1/64) This clouds the essential unity of preaching and sacrament as proclamation –consequently (logically), the priestly ordo is knit together with the concept of sacrament, but not of preaching. Following Trent (Sess. XXIII De sacramentis ordinis can. 1) ” man may be a priest without ever preaching.”(I/1/67) The basis of such dogmatics is a concept of grace “not the connexion between the Word and faith, but the connexion between a divine being as cause and a divine-creaturely being as effect. With due reservations one might even say that it understands it as a physical, not a historical, event.” (I/1/68)
The Reformers on the other hand considered proclamation not just preaching but the repetition of God’s promise, a true repetition in a human’s hearing of the promise and obedience to it. (I/1/67). It is characterized by grace understood as consequent of “the strictly personal free word of god, which reaches its goal in the equally personal free hearing of man, the hearing of faith, which in its turn can only be regarded as grace.” (ibid.) This is an excellent example of Barth’s “personalism” contrasted with the Roman Catholic concept of grace as a divine operation, channeled via the sacraments. The contrast is stark: “Grace here neither is (and remains) God’s free and personal Word nor is (and remains) hearing faith. It neither has to be just Word from God nor faith in man. Man neither needs to listen to a Word of God already spoken nor to wait for a Word of God yet to be spoken.” (I/1/78)
Barth concludes, “Hence not the sacrament alone nor preaching alone, nor yet, to speak meticulously, preaching and the sacrament in double track, but preaching with the sacrament, with the visible act that confirms human speech as God’s act, is the constitutive element, the perspicuous centre of the Church’s life” (I/1/70) and hence the touchstone of its language about God. That visible act is obedience, action in response to God’s commission to proclaim.
My own response: Barth is clearly at pains to distinguish the vagaries of human proclamation from the holy commission to proclaim God’s Word when and where and as God chooses to be present. Barth cuts deeply against both common-place “liberal” discourse of the “truth through personality” kind of preaching descended from Episcopal Bishop Philips Brooks, and the intention-centered preaching characteristic of contemporary conservative evangelicalism (the preacher “really means” what he says as the measure of truth).
On the other hand, Roman Catholic discourse has in some ways moved on from the Denziger catholicism characteristic of post-Vatican I dogmatic theology (Barth’s citations are all to Denzinger, Scheeben-Atzberger, Hurter, Bihlmeyer, etc., as he knew them in his own time). On the other hand, the expressed theological intentions of Josef Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, are not so very removed from the discourse of post-Vatican I dogmaticians. One wonders whether he would like to lead Roman Catholic dogmatics back to a fundamentally ex opere operato understanding of sacramental theology.
Barth’s insistence upon preaching + sacraments + visible act is also a refreshing corrective to occasionally lazy Anglo-Catholic “spirituality” or theology which simply wants to track preaching and sacraments together, without the visible act in the Church (obedient action) as an equally constitute element showing forth the visible centre of the Church’s life in God’s free grace.
Rev. and page numbers corrected October 2019