3. The Speech of God As the Act of God
It must be recalled from §2 that “We shall have to regard God’s speech as also God’s act, and God’s act as also God’s mystery.” (I/1/133). This is (to repeat) the fundamental structure of Church Dogmatics §5, The Nature of the Word of God.
Consequently §3 extends the previous discussion of God’s speech as at one and the same time God’s act. Unlike human speech, characterized everywhere by the discord between truth and reality, by the nakedness between “merely speaking” and some corresponding action, “The Word of God does not need to be supplemented by an act. The Word of God is itself the act of God.” (I/1/143) The rest of the chapter is essentially an extension of meditation upon this identity of God’s unique Word and God’s concrete action, “whose self-expression is as such an alteration, and indeed an absolute alteration of the world, whose passio in history is as such actio.” (I/1/144).
The utter uniqueness of God’s language and act is beyond susceptibility of general determination, that is, it cannot be determined before hand, anticipated, reproduced, or defined. Barth uses the Latin superlative concretissima for the acts “which are attested in the Bible and which are also to be expected from God in the future.” (ibid.) They are most concrete things, each a most concrete reality happening to this precise person in this precise time in this precise way and perhaps never again like that to another person –only very generally summarized as Emmanuel: God With Us.
Barth coordinated the significance of the concretissimum (God’s speaking is God’s Word is God’s Act) with the three forms of the Word of God.
1. This is means “its contingent contemporaneity.” (I/1/145) Barth distinguishes three times (or moments): the first time of God’s direct utterance in God’s revelation, the time of Jesus Christ (already presupposed in the time of Abraham), when the apostles and prophets heard; the second time is the time of their testimony: prophecy and apostolate, when Peter builds the Church, when the Canon arose as the concrete counterpart of the Church; a third time of the Church itself, of derivative proclamation. (I/1/145)
The first time stands over against the latter two as a Master stands over against servants; the biblical witnesses stand in an utterly unique and powerful position in the Church over against the rest of us. “Three times there is a saying of the Word of God through human lips. But only twice, in the biblical witnesses and us, is there first a letting of it be said to us, and only once, in our case, an indirect letting of it be said to us mediated through the Bible.” (ibid.) In consequence we utterly lack contemporaneity with the originating Word of God, and only by dissolving this sequence did liberal Protestant theology seek to overcome “Lessing’s ditch” (summarized in a long excursus) between the Bible and ourselves –but “then the concept of the Word of God is humanised in such a way that it is no wonder people prefer to use it comparatively rarely and in quotation marks; the surprising thing is that they have not preferred to drop it completely and unequivocally. . . . Not having God’s Word in the serious sense of the term, it stands alone and is referred back to itself.” (I/1/147) But by correctly ordering these moments, the Church stands with God, pointing to the Word of God, itself God’s Act –and the contingent contemporaneity of the Word of God stands on that submission and has nothing to do with the general problem of historical understanding.”Of course there is always some historical understanding —when the Word of God is manifest to us in its contemporaneity. But this historical understanding as such does not mean hearing and does not establish proclamation of God’s Word. When God’s Word is heard and proclaimed, something takes place that for all our hermeneutical skill cannot be brought about by hermeneutical skill.” (I/1/147-148).
The knowledge of the Word of God is referred to in Scripture as election, revelation, calling, setting apart, new birth –not “concepts which as it were shatter the immanence of the historical relation from within inasmuch as God is the Subject of the action denoted by them.(I/1/148) The step from one time to another can only be understood as the act of God –when Church proclamation becomes real proclamation, because it is in Holy Scripture and in Holy Scripture Christ Himself comes to expression. (I/1/149) No individual achieves this proclamation, but it takes places “solely and simply through the power of the biblical Word itself, which now makes a place for itself in a very different time, and becomes the content of this place” (ibid.) The contingency of the contemporary Act of God is two-fold: in Barth’s words “there is always a contingent illic et tunc from the standpoint of the speaking God and a contingent hic et nunc from the standpoint of hearing” human (ibid.) The step from one to another cannot be “volatilised into the general truth of a fixed or continuous relation between the three forms.” (ibid.) Barth’s concept of Word of God as encounter and event, unique in kind comes to light here.
2. “The fact that God’s Word is God’s act implies secondly its power to rule.” (ibid.) “When and where Jesus Christ becomes contemporaneous through Scripture and proclamation, when and where the “God with us” is said to us by God Himself, we come under a lordship.” (ibid.) Law and Gospel always signify an arrest of a human: “grace means simply that [a human] is no longer left to himself but is given into the hand of God.”(I/1/150) The power of this Word brings a decision, “in face of which we stand in decision between the obedience we owe it and the unfathomable inconceivability of disobedience, and consequently in the decision between bliss and perdition” (ibid.). “Where God has once spoken and is heard, i.e., in the Church, there is no escaping this power, no getting past it.” (ibid.) This is a power of election: whatever may be a person’s “attitude to God’s claim, [a human] as a hearer of His Word now finds himself [or herself] in the sphere of the divine claim [and] is claimed by God. Again, the judgment of the Word of God is not a mere aspect under which [a human] remains untouched.” (I/1/152-153)
The Word of God is not distinct from Jesus Christ: to hear the Word of God is to be drawn into the power of the lordship of Jesus Christ. Just faith in Jesus Christ lives by the power which is power before faith and apart from faith; “It lives by the power which gives faith itself its object, and in virtue of this object its very existence. (I/1/154) This is the testimony of Holy Baptism: Baptism declares that a human stands prior to all experiences and decisions, within the sphere of Christ’s lordship; (sic) “Even before he can take up an attitude to God, God has taken up an attitude to him.” ibid.) –whatever attitude a human takes, it is with reference to God –even in very unbelief, a human “will be measured by the Word of God and smitten by its power.” (ibid.) By extension, if by revelation the Word of God is to be understood, if the Bible and the Church are to be understood in the context of such memory and expectation, “then as a totality, too, the world of [humans] standing over against the Word of God must be considered as subject to a decisive alteration.” (I/1/155) Not in the light of nature, but in the light of grace is the realm of the world called in question by the Word of God, by the Gospel, God’s claim. Neither the world will evolve on its own initiative into agreement with the Word of God, nor has the Church the work of effecting such an agreement. “If the Church believes what it says it believes, then it is the place where the victory of Jesus Christ is not the last word to be heard and passed on but the first.” (I/1/156) “The fact that the truth, which is directly associated with grace in [John 1:14 ff.], is also power is something we can state without reservation in the present context. (ibid.)
3. That the Word of God is God’s act means that it is a decision –and distinguished from a mere event. While it is an event, fundamentally it is a decision that gives rise to an event, to history. “It is also human act, and as such it is also event, but as act and event it is free, as free as God Himself, for indeed God Himself is in the act.” (I/1/157) God’s decision means choice, freedom used –God’s choice for. It is not a reality in the way in which reality can be predicted of an experienceable state of affairs. “It is real, and can be understood as real, if and when it gives itself, and gives itself to be understood.” (I/1/159) As a decision in its relation to human beings it always signifies a choice –“The Word of God is an act of God which takes place specialissime, in this way and not another, to this or that particular” human. (ibid.) The calling of God’s Word may occasion election or rejection. “As divine decision the Word of God works on and in a decision of the [human] to whom it is spoken” (I/1/160). It is personal and contingent: “But when this “God with us” is said to me and heard by me, without ceasing to be the content of the Word, without changing as such, as the living and inalterable content of the Word it must now reach its goal in my variously fashioned and conditioned situation over against it, in the qualification effected in me by the Word that God speaks to me.” (ibid.) The hearer is changed by hearing the Word –it operates on and in the decision of the hearer, without yet ceasing to be divine. (This language is functionally similar to eucharistic language.) “Faith and unbelief, obedience and disobedience, are possible only to the extent that, as our act, they are our particular reply to the judgment of God pronounced to us in His Word. In faith and obedience my resolve and choice is truly good before God. Whatever else may have to be said about me, I exist in correspondence to God’s Word.” (I/1/161) God’s language is God’s act, –“the Word of God is consummated as the act of God. It is always the act of the inscrutable judgment of God.”(I/1/162)
Barth implicitly co-ordinates the three forms of the Word of God (as proclamation, as Scripture, and as Word), with these three modes of God’s act –contingently contemporaneous (in the Church), as a Word of Power (witnessed in Scripture), and as divine Decision (in God’s Word itself, or Himself). The divine reality in Barth does not subsist in and through the elements of creation, but over against them –spoken to them, outside of them (of us), and different in kind. Barth’s thorough-going understanding of the Personal Word of God as Decision, Event, and Encounter find expression in his language which borders upon the eucharistic –and in the next section, “God’s Language as God’s Mystery” his language approaches that of the classic visitations: of St. Augustine, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, or Julian of Norwich.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, Dec. 2019