4. The Unity of the Word of God
This short section is a summary just longer than one published page, supplemented by a long bibliographical excursus which indicates the historical doctrinal sources for Barth’s doctrine of the threefold form of the Word of God.
The Word of God is “is one and the same whether we understand it as revelation, Bible, or proclamation.” (I/1/120) Barth admits no distinction of degree or value whatsoever. “As the Bible and proclamation become God’s Word in virtue of the actuality of revelation they are God’s Word: the one Word of God within which there can be neither a more nor a less.” (I/1/121) Barth does admit that the first form (revelation) establishes the other two, but revelation in itself “never meets us anywhere in abstract form. We know it only indirectly, from Scripture and proclamation. The direct Word of God meets us only in this twofold mediacy.” (ibid.) This boils down to three logically interconnected but grammatically distinct statements:
- “The revealed Word of God we know only from the Scripture adopted by Church proclamation or the proclamation of the Church based on Scripture.”
- “The written Word of God we know only through the revelation which fulfills proclamation or through the proclamation fulfilled by revelation.”
- “The preached Word of God we know only through the revelation attested in Scripture or the Scripture which attests revelation.” (ibid.)
The singular analogy for this doctrine of the Word of God in its three-fold form “is itself the only analogy to the doctrine which will be our fundamental concern as we develop the concept of revelation. This is the doctrine of the triunity of God.” (ibid.) In the Trinitarian language we shall encounter “the same basic determinations and mutual relationships” of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with revelation, Scripture (written), and proclamation. Both “the decisive difficulty and also the decisive clarity” is the same in both cases. (ibid.)
Barth thus reveals to us not only the real basis of his doctrine of the Word of God, but his own manner of working: in the end, all the decisive or distinctive claims his theology makes are made by analogy within distinctive and characteristic Christian language of (above all) the Trinity. This is an example of what George Lindbeck termed linguistic isomorphism (loosely: one-to-one mapping between members of differing complex sets: an embedding that is surjective as well as injective).
The concluding excursus traces Barth’s understanding of the three-form forms of the Word of God in Luther, as brought forward by Johann Gerhard, François Turrettini, although the doctrine of inspiration “implies a freezing, as if were, of the relation between Scripture and revelation.” (I/1/124) The terms of the relationship in the Reformed Scholastics became frayed, “a private divine institution for so many private persons” i.e. the elect. (ibid.) The inroads of theological Modernism were prepared in such a catastrophic breakdown. “Responsibility for the disaster must be borne, not by the philosophy of the world which had become critical, but by the theology of the Church which had become too uncritical, which no longer understood itself at the centre.”(ibid.) –which is the responsibiility for the breakdown of the terms by which the Church could understand its own proclamation.
Barth’s agenda is then laid out in less formal terms than in the “big print” of the main text of the Church Dogmatics: “our task to-day must be the different one of re-adopting Luther’s concepts and taking proclamation seriously again as the work of the Church in and through which God is to be served and not man, and God is to speak. On that basis we must then try to understand once again in what sense first the Bible, and even before that revelation, is really the Word of God.” (ibid.)
Thus proclamation, understood as a recovery of that which is authentic in evangelical (Protestant, and Reformed) theology, is at the center of Barth’s project, and the center in turn of that project is the three-fold distinctive unity of the Word of God.
Rev. and citations corrected, Dec. 2019