1. The Question as to the Nature of the Word of God
The entire fifth section of I/1 attempts to answer the question,a “natural and popular question, also found not infrequently on the lips of theologians: What is the Word of God?” (I/1/132) Barth faces the unique difficulty of theology here: “God and His Word are not given to us in the same way as natural and historical entities. What God and His Word are, we can never establish by looking back and therewith by anticipating. This is something God Himself must constantly tell us afresh.” (ibid.)
On the part of the hearer, however, “there is no human knowing that corresponds to this divine telling.” Barth here bumps up against his commitment to the utter gracious freedom of God: God and God’s Word can in no sense become a predicate of human awareness, consciousness, or identity.
“In this divine telling there is an encounter and fellowship between His nature and man but not an assuming of God’s nature into man’s knowing, only a fresh divine telling. In this divine telling knowledge of God and His Word is actualised with the God with us..” (ibid.)
Therefore, Barth concludes, we can only by faith (a renewed and renewing, gracious gift) say who God is: one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Hence by faith the Word of God is the one Word both recalled and expected: proclamation, Scripture, and revelation. The who implies a what, “on the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity a doctrine of attributes in which is manifested the nature of God that is hidden from us, that cannot be anticipated or repeated in any human word, that cannot be adequately rendered in any human word, so, as we know what God’s Word is” (ibid.) –so also the Word of God (in its three forms) may be encountered in human language, but what it is we must say only indirectly. “We must remember the forms in which it is real for us and learn from these forms how it is..” (ibid.) But that “how” is only a reflected image, attainable by humans, or the unattainable nature of God.
Barth is anxious here to give full play to his fundamental conviction of the inadequacy of human language and concepts to voice adequately Who and What God is. It is ironic that the long series of books which Barth authored are so characterized by word such as unpredictable, irreproducible, and unattainable. Those things at some length! Barth approaches in this language the language he used earlier regarding the tangent touching the circle –the modest, carefully delimited yet utterly compelling and totally engrossing encounter of human beings with the Word of God.
This short section, however, is in reality prefaced by a long excursus in which Barth clearly indicates that this section gives not his first thoughts about this, but his second thoughts. He revises, corrected, and retracts what he wrote about the Nature of the Word of God in his earlier, “unsatisfactory” (to him) Christian Dogmatics (Die christliche Dogmatik). He regarded that earlier (1927) work as so flawed and misleading that he completely re-wrote its first (and only) volume, which then appeared in 1935 as the present first volume (I/1/) of Church Dogmatics. The long excursus –far longer than the larger-print textual paragraph of I/1/5.1– gives evidence of his retractions and important evidence of his evolving method and approach to dogmatics and historical theology. That excursus is worth its own section of this blog (and is shortly to follow).
Rev. and page numbers corrected Dec. 2019