2. The Word of God the Speech of God
It must be recalled from §1 that God and God’s Word are never presented to humans in the way in which natural or historical entities are presented to humans: we can never retrospectively define or prospectively predict what God’s Word is. God’s Word “is something God Himself must constantly tell us afresh.” (I/1/132) We can only, in view of the reality of the Church, recall and expect the one Word of God as it has been known and by faith is hoped to be known in proclamation, Scripture, and revelation. “Thus we can certainly say what God’s Word is, but we must say it indirectly.” (ibid.) Barthians would sometimes do well to dwell at length upon Barth’s own insistence upon that indirectly.
What, then, is the Word of God? (to return at great length to Barth’s own leading question). In §2 Barth directly states: “Church proclamation is talk, speech.” (I/1/132). There is no reason to take this other than in its primary and obvious sense: “‘God’s Word means that God speaks. Speaking is not a “symbol.” On the contrary, “For all its human inadequacy, for all the brokenness with which alone human statements can correspond to the nature of the Word of God, this statement does correspond to the possibility which God has chosen and actualised at all events in His Church.” (I/1/133) Barth here speaks directly against Paul Tillich’s symbolic understanding of human perception of the Holy: Barth wishes to stick strictly to the fact that the Church stands under the Word, “in this form God’s Word means that “God speaks,” and all else that is to be said about it must be regarded as exegesis.” (ibid.) “We shall have to regard God’s speech as also God’s act, and God’s act as also God’s mystery.” (ibid.) (This is the structure of the remainder of Church Dogmatics §5). But in reverse:
Barth’s crucial question, then is: “What does it imply for the concept of the Word of God if the Word of God means originally and irrevocably that God speaks?” (ibid.) Barth distinguishes three primary significations of this utterly irrevocable and irreplaceable deus dixit:
1. Barth distinguishes the spirituality of the Word of God –spirituality as distinguished from natural event, though immediately. “The Word of God is also natural and physical because without this it would not be the Word of God that is directed to us men as spiritual-natural beings, really to us as we really are. This is why the sacrament must stand alongside preaching. This is why preaching itself is also a physical event” (I/1/133-134.) Barth refuses to dismiss the corporeal, the natural. “The Word of God is also natural and physical because in the creaturely realm in which it comes to us men as Word there is nothing spiritual that is not also natural and physical.” (I/1/134.)
Barth is aware of criticism (e.g. from Erich Przywara, noted in an excursus) that he is anti-corporeal, but maintains that in both Testaments the human is addressed as a natural being also, but still as a natural being distinguished by spirit –and so Barth cannot avoid a certain relative “canonisation” of the spirit as compared with nature. (ibid.) (A later philosophical follower of Pryzwara, it must be noted, was Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II.) Barth asserts, “Speech, including God’s speech, is the form in which reason communicates with reason and person with person. To be sure it is the divine reason communicating with the human reason and the divine person with the human person. The utter inconceivability of this event is obvious. But reason with reason, person with person, is primarily analogous to what happens in the spiritual realm of creation, not the natural and physical realm. The Word of God—and at this point we should not evade a term so much tabooed to-day—is a rational and not an irrational event.” (I/1/135)
Barth was completely unwilling to surrender the verbal, rational side of Christian proclamation of the Word of God: “Speaking stands in correlation to hearing, understanding and obeying. Whatever problems may arise with regard to these terms through the fact that our concern here is with God’s speaking, and hence with the hearing, understanding and obeying correlative to this speaking—it is faith that hears, understands and obeys God’s speech— we must certainly not leave the level of these concepts of speaking, hearing, understanding and obeying if we are not to set ourselves at some other place than where God’s Word is heard.” (ibid.)
2. Barth distinguishes the personal character of the Word of God: not a thing to be described nor a concept to be defined. (How close is Barth to moments in the discourse of the later Wittgenstein!) “It is the truth as it is God’s speaking person, Dei loquentis persona. It is not an objective reality. It is the objective reality, in that it is also subjective, the subjective that is God.” (I/1/136) It always has a perfectly definite, objective content.
Barth’s famous “God always –speaks a concretissimum” (I/1/136-137) requires a bit of unpacking. For moderns, the image of “concrete” is unavoidably structural (e.g., buildings, highways). The Romans, of course, lacked concrete (though they had mortar): concretum is the past perfect participle of concresco, to grow together, congeal, become hard (hence what modern concrete does!). The superlative concretissimum is what the Word of God has become: most hard, most grown-together, most congealed –but originally something definite but perhaps also (unknowable to broken humanity) less congealed. What has grown together most obviously is God’s Son: “The equation of God’s Word and God’s Son makes it radically impossible to say anything doctrinaire in understanding the Word of God.”(I/1/137) Never a corpus, a defined concept, a proposition –against Roman Catholic theology in the manuals of doctrine, against Old Protestant high definitions, against modern fundamentalist propositionalism.
Barth’s personalism here has full rein: “the personal character of God’s Word means, not its deverbalising, but the posing of an absolute barrier against reducing its wording to a human system or using its wording to establish and construct a human system. It would not be God’s faithfulness but His unfaithfulness to us if He allowed us to use His Word in this way. This would mean His allowing us to gain control over His Word, to fit it in with our own designs, and thus to shut up ourselves against Him to our own ruin. ” (I/1/139)
3. Barth distinguishes the purposiveness of the Word of God: God speaks it most concretely for particular reasons known only to God’s self at particular times to particular humans: its pointedness, its character of address. (ibid.) It is God’s free gift, free act, and the human who hears it is included in it as a factual, but not essential necessity: it could have been otherwise. The hearer is not ““co-posited” in it in the way Schleiermacher’s God is in the feeling of absolute dependence.” (Here Barth specifically disavowed his previous unfortunate formulate in his earlier edition) “The real content of God’s speech or the real will of the speaking person of God is not in any sense, then, to be construed and reproduced by us as a general truth.” (I/1/140) As readers of Scripture and hearers and bearers of proclamation, we may remind each other what we believe God has said to this or that person, or is about to say. “But in so doing we have always to bear in mind that these materials are our own work and are not to be confused with the concrete fulness of the Word of God itself which we recall and for which we wait, but only point to it.” (I/1/141). The purposiveness of God’s Word remains proper to It.
The transition, however, is difficult.
We can anticipate nothing of its real content, but (characteristically!) Barth does make four points:
- “First, the Word of God as directed to us is a Word which we do not say to ourselves and which we could not in any circumstances say to ourselves.” (ibid.)
- “The Word of God is the Word of the Lord because it comes from the point outside and above us from which death itself would not speak to us even if it could speak at all. The Word of God applies to us as no human word as such can do, and as death does not do, because this Word is the Word of our Creator . . .” (I/1/142)
- “[T]he Word of God as the Word of the Creator directed to us is the Word which has obviously become necessary and is necessary as a renewal of the original relation between us and Him. The fact that God speaks to us, that He reveals Himself to us, i.e., that He turns to us in a wholly new way, that as the Unknown He makes Himself known” (ibid.) –which could not possibly be the content of a human word.
- “[T]he Word of God as the Word of reconciliation directed to us is the Word by which God announces Himself to man, i.e., by which He promises Himself as the content of man’s future, as the One who meets him on his way through time as the end of all time, as the hidden Lord of all times.” (I/1/161-162) This final, eschatological Word could never be a human word: it must come from God.
As a tangent touches a circle?
Barth concludes, “what God says to us specifically remains His secret which will be disclosed in the event of His actual speaking.” (I/1/143) The concrete content is and must remain really God’s affair. When God spoke “it was, and when He will speak it will be, the Word of the Lord, the Word of our Creator, our Reconciler, our Redeemer.” (ibid.) We are commanded to hold our human thinking ready and watchful from these four points of view.
This section certainly grounds Barth’s personalism and contingency is full view: the Word of God as Event, as Person, as Contingency. God’s language is therefore quite distinct from every other human Wissenschaft –whether intellectual, natural, or historical (including church history!)
Rev. and page numbers corrected, Dec. 2019