4. The Speech of God as the Mystery of God.
“The speech of God is and remains the mystery of God in its onesidedness.” (I/1/174). In succession to worldliness, Barth’s second cardinal attribute of God’s language as God’s mystery is one-sidedness, and he employs an unusual first-person singular to explain further what he means.
I have in mind here the relation of veiling and unveiling occasioned by the secularity of the Word.. (ibid.)
Barth sets up here a strong polarity without resolution of a middle term: God’s Word is addressed to us and grasped by us as it meets us, not partly veiled, partly unveiled, but either veiled or unveiled, without ever becoming a different word, “without being spoken and received any the less truly either way.” (ibid.) Barth notes the absolute here: it may absolutely change from veiling to unveiling (or back), and by absolutely Barth means for the time being, “it is always unalterably the same in itself, always the one or the other for us.” This is encounter, on our side strictly limited, and absolutely veiled or unveiled without ever ceasing to less than the whole Word of God, “the limit set by the very Word spoken to us, which will not let itself be made a whole, a synthesis or a system whether in theory or in practice.” (ibid.)
Lest one regards Barth’s language as paradoxical (a reasonable estimation!), Barth specifically disavows paradox: the connection between the veiled Word of God and the unveiled Word of God is not apparent to us:
To receive the Word of God does not mean on either side to be able to see and know and state the relation between the two sides, to be able to say why and how far the veiled Word now means unveiling or the unveiled Word means veiling. If we could know and state this, the Word of God would obviously cease to be a mystery, and would just be a paradox like others, a paradox behind whose supposed mystery one can more or less easily penetrate. (ibid.)
Kierkegaard might have been surprised to see the words paradox and comfortably in the same sentence! Barth’s point however is thoroughly Kierkegaardian:
The speech of God is and remains a mystery to the extent that its totality as such, and hence with all the weight and seriousness of God’s Word, is always manifest to us only on one side and always remains hidden on the other side. Hidden, and not simply withheld: In what is manifest to us the hidden side is always contained, but as a hidden side, so that we can grasp and have it only as such, i.e., only in faith. (ibid.)
This language is so reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s knight of faith in Fear and Trembling that Barth here might be considered justly as Kierkegaard’s only true inheritor.
What remains hidden in revelation (opposites again) remains hidden in God’s own hand, remains to be sought and found there –not translated into our own insights, given some correspondence –the clarity which God gives us there (and which God induces in us as well). “For the point of God’s speech is not to occasion specific thoughts or a specific attitude but through the clarity which God gives us, and which induces both these in us, to bind us to Himself.” (I/1/175) More Kierkegaardian language.! This occurs only when we encounter God at human limit –God’s own mystery.
God’s language is God’s mystery in its one-sidedness in the forms of the Word of God, especially in preaching and Scripture. The “God with us” there spoken to us we may indeed here in its secular form (i.e., as words in the Church), but really hear it in that way –in its veiledness or in its unveiledness. One God’s side that is (or may be) the same thing, but for us it is altogether not the same thing, but two –or one thing only for faith. We may hear God as God veils Himself or unveils Himself: both times the question is to hear the whole, the real Word of God. In a sense the veiled Word of God is the form and the unveiled is the content, but Barth hedges this language with unusual care: “Erasure of the distinction and indeed of the antithesis of form and content we cannot achieve.” (ibid) One form is “realistic” theology (veiled), the other “idealistic” theology, and neither are faithful, but both are probably unavoidable: we cannot think this “in a Christian sense,” that is, faithfully.
And to seek synthesis is the least faithful response. “Faith means recognising that synthesis cannot be attained and committing it to God and seeking and finding it in Him.” (ibid.) But we doing so, “Committing it to God and seeking it in God, we really do find it; we hear the full and true Word of God.” (ibid.) This movement of faith recognizes its own limits before the mystery of God’s language. “Finding it in God, we acknowledge that we cannot find it ourselves, whether by achieving it in a specific attitude or by thinking it out systematically.” (ibid.) (So much for “systematic theology!”) This does not mean, again, the discerning of the unity of the veiling and unveiling, the discerning of the unity of realistic and idealistic theology –but theology is justified and sanctified by God’s language as God’s mystery, “by the object of faith, by God, though the believer, and therefore his thinking, do not cease to be less needy on this account.” (I/1/176) We cannot give ourselves faith.
Hence, “our thinking either on the one side or the other is confronted by a wall which we can neither overthrow nor make transparent.” (ibid.). Believing “means either hearing the divine content of God’s Word even though nothing but the secular form is discernible by us.” (ibid.) Barth’s subsequent excursus relates this carefully to Johannine language of the concepts of “Father” and “Son:” knowing the content of one is to know the content of the other.”
Barth dryly notes that “it might seem surprising that the movement of faith, or rather the movement of God’s Word which faith can only follow, is described so explicitly and totally as twofold. This is not done in the interests of a scheme,” –as though Barth had let his architectonic sense get away from his intention. Barth’s metaphor is “what is at issue in faith is to pierce, or to see to be pierced, the concealment in which God speaks to us in proclamation, in the Bible and in Christ Himself, and thus to see and hear that the very concealment of God is his true and real revealing.” (I//1/176-177) There follows a long excursus on Luther’s sermon about Jesus and the Canaanite woman, St. Matthew 15:21 and following. Jesus’ yea and nay to her veil and unveil each other in quick succession but never synthesis, never achieve a false unity. Barth affirms that “Only in the consummation when faith ceases altogether can we imagine man no longer needing but relieved of this reverse movement of faith, this recollection of the secularity of the Word of God. ” Otherwise Barth foresees a backwards movement, a backwards endorsement of mysticism. Barth slams the door: “what could thought about this experience be but theologia gloriae, speculatio Maiestatis, if it were to stop there?” (I/1/178)
Roman Catholic and Protestant theologia gloriae has constantly appealed to this experience, to triumphant faith, and has failed to see that in abandoning the indirectness of the knowledge of God it has immediately abandoned true faith and the real Word of God as well. (ibid.)
In a short excursus Barth criticizes “the mystic as such [who] denies this reversal; in ecstasy before unveiled Deity he ceases to be aware of the veiling; he regards proclamation, Bible and Christ in their secularity as mere symbols of the Godhead now unveiled to him” (ibid.) –but gives no example. In the habit of graduate school, I am left asking, “where do you (Barth) find that, in which text?”
The “straight line” of human experience (whether to positivistic triumphant knowledge of God, or despair of knowledge of God) is forbidden by the Word of God “which calls us from despair to triumph, from solemnity to joy, but also from triumph to despair and from joy to solemnity.” (I/1/179). This discipline of the Word of God is critical: God never leaves us merely to ourselves: “everything depends on our hearing it either way as said by God.” (ibid.) This places the one-sidedness of God’s movement in the Word of God in line with other antithetic concepts: law and gospel, demand and promise, letter and spirit, God’s judgment and God’s grace.
The Word of God in its veiling, its form, is the claiming of man by God. The Word of God in its unveiling, its content, is God’s turning to man. The Word of God is one. (sic Barth’s text, and ibid. location)
Barth concludes, “One of them is always true in experience and thought, and we must always believe the other that we do not see. (ibid.)
Barth follows with a long excursus upon these antitheses in Scripture: in Old Testament covenant and new covenant (Exodus 19-20 contrasted with Jeremiah 31.31), Synoptic and Johannine views of Jesus Christ, and St. Paul’s language of in Christo. “[T]his external one-sidedness of God’s Word, resting on an inner two-sidedness not apparent to us, that makes faith faith, that makes it the apprehended apprehension. . . . From the Word of God faith has not only its existence but also this its nature.” (I/1/181).
Barth’s position is a stark challenge to mainstream Protestant and Catholic theology. A great deal of classic Protestant theology in the tradition of Schleiermacher or even Jonathan Edwards looks for evidence that a human being can apprehend God’s language by analogy with the known world. Certainly Thomist, Scotist and later doctrines of analogy have proven useful in Catholic theology to teach and essential similarity between how a human being knows truths and things within the usual world, and how that human being can apprehend God and God’s activity in the world.
To all this Barth speaks his (characteristically resounding) NEIN! –the Word of God is as unique in its reception as it is by its nature: how else can God be God? At the heart of Barth’s understanding of onesidedness as characteristic of the language of God as God’s mystery is his persistent concern for God’s freedom, God’s utterly unique position beyond and above human experience, human language. In one sense God’s language in preaching and Scripture is utterly worldly, utterly knowable, but in another sense it is utterly veiled, and its unveiling is God’s breaking through the wall rather than rendering the wall transparent. Faith is utterly the work of God in turning to humans, and is transparent or opaque moment to moment, but never both, and never just one–how utterly distinct is that from almost all North American theologies, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, or so-called mainstream?
Finally, “The speech of God is and remains the mystery of God in its spirituality.” (I/1/181) Geistlichkeit as “spirituality” is a term as problematic in German as it is in English, as often used in churches. For Barth, however, it has a specific reference: “we expressly allude for the first time to the concept of the Holy Spirit.” (I/1/182) This is the first time that “Holy Spirit” as a concept is significantly discussed in Church Dogmatics, and Barth lays down his parameters carefully:
To say Holy Spirit in preaching or theology is always to say a final word. For when we do this, then whether we are aware of it or not, and it is best to be aware of it, we are always speaking of the event in which God’s Word is not only revealed to man but also believed by him. We are always speaking of the way in which the Word of God is so said to this or that man that he must hear it, or of the way in which this or that man is so open and ready for the Word of God that he can hear it.
Barth goes on, “all theological anthropology, i.e., all teaching about the man to whom God’s Word is revealed and by whom it is received, must stand under this sign.” (ibid.)
Rev. and page numbers corrected, March 2020