2. The Written Word of God.
The “written Word of God” is a topic much closer to the root of Protestant Christian identity, and as such most of Barth’s comments here seem to be written with Protestant disputes in mind.
But he does not begin with Protestants, but again with a Catholic understanding, since the Church must proclaim upon the basis of the recollection of past revelation, and in hope and expectation of future revelation. The Church speaks on the basis that God’s Word has already been spoken, and hence in recollection.
Such recollection might “mean the actualisation of a revelation of God originally immanent in the existence of every man, i.e., of man’s own original awareness of God. In this case recollection of God’s enacted revelation would be identical with the discovery and fresh appropriation of a long hidden, forgotten and unused part, and indeed the most central and significant part, of the timeless essential constitution of man himself, namely, his relation to the eternal or absolute..” (I/1/99) Barth in a supportive excursus traces this view to St. Augustine’s memoria, and its connection with Platonic anamnesis. Thus the Church could be founded upon herself as the Church “so that it could continually ground itself upon itself by continually returning to itself as such, this being recollection of God’s past revelation” (I/1/100). In a rhetorical excursus, Barth quips:
The Neo-Platonist and the Catholic churchman could obviously exist quite well in personal union in Augustine. Why should not both have been right? (ibid.)
Based upon reasoning from such a concept of divine freedom or power, no reason can exist why this should not be the state of affairs: but such a reason does consist in the fact “that God has not made this use of His freedom or power.” In other words, it could be so, but in fact the witness of the written Word of God points us “in a very different direction.” (ibid.)
On the basis of exegesis –Barth’s “exegetical path”– the Church “has not the confidence to appeal to itself as the source of the divine Word in support of the venture of proclamation.” (ibid.) Rather, the Church ventures proclamation on the basis of the commission, object, judgment, event “in recollection of which it is validated in its proclamation and believes it is summoned to proclamation.” (ibid.) Jesus Christ, head of the Church, “has the Church within Himself but whom the Church does not have within itself.” (ibid.) There is no interchangeable relationship: “He is immanent in it only as He is transcendent to it.” (I/1/100-101) Concretely, over against the Church stands an entity like the church as a phenomenon, yet different from and superior to it: Holy Scripture. “It is the bolt which in fact shuts out Platonic anamnesis here.” (I/1/101)
Simply Holy Scripture by tells us what God’s past revelation (is), which we have to recollect. It is the canon, the measure or regula fidei. Hence the church is not just left alone, but the Scripture founds the Church’s proclamation as object, as the judgment to which her proclamation is liable. But it is not an abstract general principle; rather the connection is determinative of the content of proclamation: an order received, an obligation incurred. Holy Scripture is a Church document, proclamation in writing, the nub of the Church’s life: preaching today is a continuation of the same event (or series of events) that finds “Jeremiah and Paul at the beginning and the modern preacher of the Gospel at the end of one and the same series.” (I/1/102)
Since Holy Scripture is in itself the deposit of proclamation (prophetic, apostolic) made in the past by human mouths, this raises the question of succession or vicariate for the Church’s Lord. According to Barth Protestant Christians cannot initially take exception to the Roman Catholic definition of this vicariate, because that there is succession was a concept well-founded in early tradition and Patristic writers.
Here again, then, the difference between the Evangelical view and the Roman Catholic view is not in respect of the That but the How. And even in respect of the How no objection in principle can be raised on our part against the concentration of the apostolate in Peter or the possibility of a primacy in the Church which might be that of the Roman community. The protest of Protestantism in this question of succession is directed solely and simply against the fact that the Tu es Petrus, etc., is mechanically transferred over Peter’s head to every succeeding Roman bishop as a second, third and hundredth Peter, as if the succession and tradition of the Peter of Mt. 16, to whom flesh and blood had not revealed such things, could be related to any succession but a spiritual one, or as if, being spiritual, it could be tied to the secular circumstance of a list of bishops of this kind. (I/1/103)
By this view Peter, the apostolate, and Holy Scripture cease to be a free power in the Church and over against the Church, “On this presupposition the Church is again left to itself and referred to itself and its self-reflection.” (I/1/104) And an additional oral, unwritten tradition could “thinly” apply here, but in fact in such unwritten tradition “In unwritten tradition the Church is not addressed; it is engaged in dialogue with itself,” because such unwritten tradition lacks objective stability. (I/1/105)
The concrete authority of free Holy Scripture requires also a thorough-going distinction between Text and commentary. “Thus exegesis, without which the norm cannot assert itself as a norm, entails the constant danger that the Bible will be taken prisoner by the Church, that its own life will be absorbed into the life of the Church, that its free power will be transformed into the authority of the Church, in short, that it will lose its character as a norm magisterially confronting the Church.” (I/1/106) Any exegesis stands in danger of become imposition rather than exposition, and deteriorate into a dialogue of the Church with itself. But self-defense of the text must be left to the text itself: a free, objective reality which confronts the life of the Church with a word of judgment and grace.
In Barth’s final analysis the canon is the Canon simply because it is so: “the Bible constitutes itself the Canon. It is the Canon because it imposed itself upon the Church as such, and continually does so.” (I/1/107) This reflects the fundamental free reality of the Word of grace:
The Scripture with this content must confront the life of the Church, which can be life only in this relation, as an entity full of its own vitality and free power, as a criterion which cannot be dissolved into the historical life of the Church. Finally, the Scripture with this content must always become again and again the thing we started with, the object of authentic recollection in which the Church with its proclamation looks and moves forward to the future. “I believe, therefore do I speak” ( Ps. 116:10). Hearing this word with faith in its promise demands proclamation and makes it possible. (I/1/108)
“The Bible is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that He speaks through it. In this second equation no less than the first (namely, that Church proclamation is God’s Word) we cannot abstract from the free action of God in and by which He causes it to be true to us and for us here and now that the biblical word of man is His own Word.” (1/1/109-110) This must be allowed as true: “We accept it as a description of God’s action in the Bible, whatever may be the experiences we have or do not have in this connexion. ” (I/1/110) This act of God is an event, not that humans reach out to the Bible, but that the Bible has reached out, and reaches out, to humans. “The Bible, then, becomes God’s Word in this event, and in the statement that the Bible is God’s Word the little word “is” refers to its being in this becoming. It does not become God’s Word because we accord it faith but in the fact that it becomes revelation to us. But the fact that it becomes revelation to us beyond all our faith, that it is God’s Word even in spite of our lack of faith, is something we can accept and confess as true to us and for us only in faith,” (ibid.)
This cuts equally against Roman Catholic “mechanical” dogmatics as well as liberal Protestant interpretation in which religious experience plays a vital role in hearing God’s Word in Scripture (i.e., Schleiermacher, Bushnell, etc.)
Barth’s commitment to the Word of God as Event here is difficult to hear, because humans always want an external criterion by which to measure how and why God’s Word is in Holy Scripture. Barth has certainly been accused of a certain arbitrariness here (and elsewhere): God’s Word simply imposes itself in Holy Scripture. And the sheer “given-ness” of Word of God as Event is hard to avoid here –the alternative being some human conception, “because in fact this object and no other is the promise of future divine revelation which can make proclamation a duty for the Church and which can give it joy and courage for this duty. If we thought we could say why this is so, we should again be acting as if we had in our hands a measure by which we could measure the Bible and on this basis assign it its distinctive position.” (I/1/107). In that case our hearing of God’s Word in Holy Scripture is logically dependent upon the wisdom of our (or the Church’s) self-dialogue, although it would be a self-dialogue concerned with the Bible.
Barth is trying to move beyond the Church’s self-dialogue about the Bible (ever a clear and present danger in theological education!) to a hearing of God’s Word Itself in the event of hearing Holy Scripture. The wisdom of the traditional prayer (included in Anglican and Episcopal worship since 1549) “blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scripture(s) to be written for our learning” (placed by Cranmer et al. 1549 in Advent, but in the 1979 Book on the penultimate Sunday of Pentecost) is that it recognizes God’s role in establishing “all Holy Scripture(s)” as a historical fact independent of the Church’s control, and which confronts the Church with God’s judgment and grace.
Barth does note, however, “the great historical example of this discovery of the Canon that is given to the Church in the Bible in virtue of its content is the early period of the Reformation. What took place in Wittenberg and Zurich in the twenties of the 16th century and in Geneva in the thirties is like a book of illustrations of what has just been said.” (I/1/108) As a historian, this poses an interesting dilemma: the events of those specific times and places takes a place very close to the inner reality of Scripture. In this case, Church History is not just the secondary (though important) discipline Barth described in I/1/3 but runs the danger of either being reduced to a “a book of illustrations” of a particular doctrinal position, or of being only partially understood. Much of the reality of Wittenberg, Zürich, and Geneva –and of Strasbourg, Cologne, Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere– was a great deal messier and less amenable to reduction to “a book of illustrations.”
Barth does not make his own position dependent upon the truth of any historical interpretation of those times and places, so much as imply that those times and places take an important place in “holy memory” –a memory which is always perilous. Would the Church now want to affirm everything Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Bucer, Cranmer, et al. did, or only some things? Upon which basis? “Great historical examples” of any doctrinal position or subscribed human idea have a funny way of escaping intellectual control and confronting those who hold them with the sheer otherness or contrariness of other human beings acting in all their historical contingency and agency.
Rev., and page numbers corrected Oct. 2019