4. The Speech of God as the Mystery of God
“God’s language as God’s mystery” forms the third series of attributes of the Word of God. Barth is still working on the question, “What is the Word of God?” (I/1/132) by exploring the three forms of the Word of God (in §4) and then “in view of these three forms” by inquiring into the nature of this entity as “three distinct but not different determinations.” (I/1/187). In §5 Barth turns to the really decisive element, “that in everything our concern is with God’s speech and God’s act,.” (I/1/162, italics added)
At once, however, Barth must confront a persistent difficulty for all who try to think theologically in the Church, whether “might be a continual temptation to think and speak of the Logos of God as thus described in the same way as we think and speak of some other spiritual factor that may be hard to grasp but can in fact be grasped . . . that we think we perceive its structure and understand its operation, so that in thought and speech at least we are its master, as well or as badly as man may become the master of any object of thought or speech. (ibid.) Barth continues to argue against understanding theology in the Church (Church Dogmatics) as just another subject in the University curriculum, or even just another subject along side of New Testament Theology, or Church History. God’s Word properly cannot be understand as subject to human inquiry and mastery, however subtle. “God’s speech is different from all other speech and God’s action is different from all other action. But do we not deny this very distinction if we think we can possess and apply a measure of this distinction?” (I/1/164) “All our delimitations can only seek to be signals or alarms to draw attention to the fact that God’s Word is and remains God’s, not bound and not to be attached to this thesis or to that antithesis.” (ibid.) — a “theological warning against theology.” (I/1/165)
The substance of this section is at the same time (nevertheless) one of Barth’s most notable expressions of his core belief in the personalist contingency of the event of the Word of God. This section repeats Barth’s fondness of structures of three –three forms of the Word of God; three attributes– in language both explicit and paradoxical. It is as though one regards the facets of a crystal from one angle, turns the crystal, and regards the same facets again as appearing quite differently from a second (or subsequent) angle. What are those facets of that singular mystery (Geheimnis)?
God’s language is God’s mystery above all in its:
- secularity (Welthaftigkeit);
- onesidedness (Einseitigkeit);
- spirituality (Geistlichkeit).
This blog entry will consider and respond to Barth’s first point.
1. Secularity (Welthaftigkeit) is a translation of the German which requires some care. It is not the same as mere Weltlichkeit, which is closer to what English speakers ordinarily mean by “worldliness” –English-language secularity, intellectual sophistication bordering upon disillusionment. (N.B. G. T. Thomson in the earlier 1934-1936 English edition translated the word as “worldliness,” a term with its own problems.) Nor is it simply “the world, the flesh, and the Devil,” a familiar trope. Welthaftigkeit is more “thoroughly situated in the world,” not in a moral (or immoral) sense so much as the sense of here-and-now. Aidan Nichols describes Hans Urs von Balthasar’s sense of this term as “the truth of the world in its prevailing worldly quality” (Scattering the Seed, p. 100). For Barth, “The speech of God is and remains the mystery of God supremely in its secularity” (I/1/165). Barth illustrates this point by citing indisputable historical or sociological facts: “Preaching is also in fact an address. The sacrament is also in fact a symbol in compromising proximity to all other possible symbols. The Bible is also in fact the historical record of a Near Eastern tribal religion and its Hellenistic offshoot. Jesus Christ is also in fact the Rabbi of Nazareth who is hard to know historically and whose work, when He is known, might seem to be a little commonplace . . .” (ibid.) Barth’s point? “The veil is thick. We do not have the Word of God otherwise than in the mystery of its secularity.” (ibid.)
Barth seems allergic to the word “paradox” but no other word (adjectival) could describe this sentence: “This means, however, that we have it [the Word of God] in a form which as such is not the Word of God and which as such does not even give evidence that it is the form of the Word of God.” (ibid.) It not direct presentation, but not as though in a mirror either (indirect), and is not comparable with any other form of self-presentation. Either “normal” communication is direct, or indirect (marked with certain signs of similarities of matter and form) which can resolve into direct communication. Not at all so is the Word of God. “[T]he self-presentation of God in His Word is not direct, nor is it indirect in the way in which a man’s face seen in a mirror can be called an indirect self-presentation of this man.” (ibid.) The Word God cannot be known directly, but not exactly indirectly, either. “This is the very thing that is ruled out in the case of God’s Word. Its form is not a suitable but an unsuitable medium for God’s self-presentation. It does not correspond to the matter but contradicts it. It does not unveil it but veils it.” (I/1/166) Given the fallenness of the human condition, our knowledge of the Word of God cannot be pure, but must be a creaturely reality: we know it, insofar as we know it; “It is wholly through our fallen reason.” (ibid.) We can only know God through “the cosmos” (creaturely reality), but “in such a way that this “through it” means “in spite if it.”” (ibid.). Every instance of the Word of God proclaimed, in Scripture, or revealed is ” an act of God in the reality which contradicts God, which conceals Him” (I/1/168). It is “His miraculous act, the tearing of an untearably thick veil, i.e., His mystery.” (ibid.)
This revelation of the Word of God is fundamentally Incarnation, and that means the Word of God entering into this Welthaftigkeit, this sphere of the not-God which is a fallen sphere. The veiled reality of God is not a disagreeable accident, an unfortunate result of the Fall, but a condition of reality itself. “It is not, then, that God was concealed from us by some unfortunate disturbance and that He revealed Himself by removing the concealment, ” such that human attempts would be “to help God by forcing his own way into the mystery. (I/1/169). “The truth is, however, that God veils Himself and that in so doing—this is why we must not try to intrude into the mystery—He unveils Himself.” (ibid.) And it is good that God does this, and does not reveal Himself without veil (even in the transparently misleading form of the analogia entis) –for God to otherwise would be the end of us. “[I]t is spoken as it is, revealing in its concealment, is a decisive indication of the truth that it has really come to us instead of our having to go to it, an attempt in which we could only fail.” (ibid.) The Welthaftigkeit of the Word of God enables God’s speech. “In its very secularity it is thus in every respect a Word of grace.” (ibid.)
(Here again in a long excursus Barth takes up his fundamental disagreement with Gogarten, with whom he shared much, and with Erich Przywara, S.J. regarding the knowability of God, the impossibility of a so-called “theological anthropology” (understanding of the Human) from their points of view, and the latter’s misunderstanding and labeling of Barth’s position as “sinister reduction running through my whole work” –as if the very mystery of the Welthaftigkeit of the Word of God could be reduced; I/1/172.)
Barth’s understanding of the simultaneous veiling and unveiling of the Word of God in our creaturely reality is a sure corrective both again the presumptiveness of much soft-core Evangelical Protestant theology (“Jesus and me” unmediated, commensensical, and by analogy empirically knowable), and the far more serious presumptiveness of the traditional Roman Catholic idea of the analogy of being (analogia entis) –that we can know God in analogy to the way that we know the creaturely reality. We know God’s Word through and in spite of the creaturely reality in which we must live (do we know any other reality), and we do so only by God’s grace –we cannot presume to understand or penetrate the reality and occasion of that Grace. Barth here treads close to a kind of fideism (undoubtedly he would be so charged by Pryzwara, Ratzinger, et al.) –but on the other hand, by so strongly marking the boundary between God and humans, Barth frees the Church –the community gathered in obedience to the Word– from ordaining itself with sole responsibility to bear the Word. The Word of God in its utter secularity is fundamentally God’s word of Grace, to which the Church, gathered in obedience and witness, can only seek to respond faithfully.
(Parts 2 and 3 of this sub-section are continued in the next post.)
Rev. and page numbers corrected, Dec. 2019