2. The Word of God and the Word of Man
Barth’s trenchant reservation, that “the concept of its knowledge [of the Word of God] cannot be definitively measured by the concept of the knowledge of other objects or by a general concept of knowledge” (I/1/190) –which closed the previous section–becomes useful immediately. What does it mean that it is the human (Mensch, translated previously as man) who is described as a knower of the Word of God?
That this could be so is inherent to the concept of the Church. What makes it the Church is God’s Word that it hears and proclaims to humans in its three forms (as previous §4) –yet not only heard and known as an event, “but known in the sense already generally established.” (I/1/191) This Word is “undoubtedly the Word that God speaks by and to Himself in eternal concealment.” (ibid.) –but undoubtedly also that Word spoken to humans in revelation, Scripture, and preaching, and hence in the human who hears it: pre-eminently and primarily Jesus Christ, himself the Word of God. Barth’s personalism here frames his alternative to “the so-to-speak anthropological problem: ” how are humans constituted to hear and proclaim this Word?(ibid.) Is there a general constitution of humans, a general ability that like other human abilities enables this activity, derivative from a general understanding of humans about what and how reality is perceptible –“and within it a [human’s] ability to know the Word of God.” (ibid.)
This is not Barth’s preferred formulation but it is forced by the “almost invincible development in the history of Protestant theology since the Reformation” that has led to an affirmative answer by “the whole wing of the Church that we have called Modernist.” (ibid.) Barth next presents a long two-page excursus that trances this development from Protestant 17th-century orthodox to “J. G. Planck” (properly Gottlieb Jakob Planck, 1794), Herder, and Schleiermacher.
The “almost invincible development” began in Protestant Orthodoxy’s answer to the question whether theology is a speculative or practical Wissenschaft (knowledge or science) –that nuda speculatio de Deo was to be shunned and theology regarded as scientia practica, the Word of God as addressed to human realities. (I/1/191-192) This implied, however, that object of theology (given the rise of natural science) became transferred “from a Beyond genuinely confronting the place of [humans] to the sphere of [humans] itself.” (I/1/192.) –embraced and conditioned by general truths about human perception, knowledge, and self-understanding. A sense of “theology as the science of religion” grew stronger while Reformation doubts concerning the value of self-understanding as a basis for understanding God grew weaker.(ibid.) Schleiermacher was the first fundamentally to relate the depth, power and independent reality of religion “to a corresponding possibility that can be generally demonstrated anthropologically” and consequently interprets Christianity within human religious experience that actualizes a human capacity. (ibid.) Knowledge of God hence became the actualization of a specific possibility of knowledge peculiar to (or inherent in) humans themselves. Whether Schliermacher’s or Heidegger’s variety of anthropology is more congenial is a secondary matter.
Characteristically, Barth answers Nein!
First, the Word of God “is an event in and to the reality” of a human. (I/1/193). In principle this event can be described as “experience” or even “religious” experience to denote “the supremely real and determinative entry of the God of God into” human reality.(ibid.) What Barth wants to avoid is burden the term “religious experience” has assumed, the idea that a human being in general is capable of religious experience, and (most significantly, in my view) that any such “capability has the critical significance of a norm.” (ibid., italics added) The description “religious experience” cannot count as a norm against which the event of the Word of God is to be assessed.
Secondly, “a possibility or capability on man’s part must correspond logically and materially to this event.” Barth is going after the understanding (or misunderstanding) regarding a Kantian “religious a priori” current during the years of Barth’s own experience as a student and pastor. Such a concept logically entails a Kantian “faculty,” a disposition, logical organ, native property of some kind that can be reached and discovered by self-reflection –in other words under a human’s control.
Instead Barth proposes that the event “the Word of God” does not so much presuppose some kind of native Kantian human faculty as bring with it such experience, and confer on a human such a possibility so that it is not only truly a human’s possibility (–it happens to a human!) but also is “wholly and utterly the possibility proper to the Word of God and to it alone.”(ibid.) The knowledge which this event make intelligible is only in terms of the object of knowledge and not in terms of the (human) subject of knowledge –what is known, not the knower.
The purposiveness of the Word of God –(see the statement in §5.2.3 above, I/1/140, “[A] Hearing [human]], as the object of the purpose of the speaking God, is thus included in the concept of the Word of God as a factual necessity, but . . . . is not essential to it.”) –this purposiveness is as “the act of God’s free love and not as if the addressed and hearing human were in any way essential to the Word of God.” (I/1/194) God’s Word would no longer be grace, and grace would no longer be grace, if a human predisposition to hear is intrinsically and independently native. (ibid.)
The Word of God as event is (in Barth’s phrase) in concretissimo, in the most exact, concrete, and definite particulars for an individual human, and authentic encounter which a human cannot achieve, but only be told. It limits a human’s condition to being ever upheld over a void, “created out of nothing and upheld over nothing.” (ibid.) This event is a radical renewal and radical critique of a human’s present existence “on the basis of which he can understand himself [sic] only as a sinner living by grace and therefore as a lost sinner closed up against God on his side.”(ibid.) This God is the Future One towards whom a human’s existence is hastening. These formulae do not describe the Word of God so much as consistently hold that when God speaks the content of the Word necessarily and always tells a human “that there can be no question of any ability to hear or understand or know on his part, of any capability” that this sinner might hold as the one waits, but “that the possibility of knowledge corresponding to the real Word of God has come” as an “unconceivable novum,” or new thing which hitherto is unknown, unexpected, and unheard. (ibid.)
Barth anchors this novum in a thorough reading of I Corinthians 2.6ff about the wisdom of God in Christ as unknown to the rulers of this world, not seen by any eye, not heard by any ear, accessible only to the Spirit through the Spirit. His view runs directly counter to the Modernist view that goes back to the Renaissance and in particular to Descartes and his “proof of God from human self-certainty.” (I/1/195) Barth is wary of philosophizing such that the reader inadvertently runs from Descartes to Aristotle or Thomas; “the fact of God’s Word does not receive its dignity and validity in any respect or even to the slightest degree from a presupposition that we bring to it.” (I/1/196) Self-certain human experience of the Word is grounded, measured, and valid on the basis of the certainty of God. “In the real knowledge of God’s Word, in which alone that beginning is made, there also lies the event that it is possible, that that beginning can be made.” (ibid.) Humans can know the Word of God only because God wills it; the alternative is the impotence of disobedience which the Word of God in concretissimo sets aside. “Vis-à-vis the Word of God there is no man [sic] in general and as such; the Word of God is what it is and it is concretely spoken to this or that specific” human. (ibid.) The question is how a specific human can know this Word concretely spoken.
Barth elucidates two further points:
1. Yes to the knowability of the Word of God, but No to the criticism that humans and the Word of God are “rent asunder” (here Barth is responding to his early critics). Barth wanted his readers to hear this Yes and not only his clear No.
2. Barth has answered positively only to the extent that his answer is a reference to the event of the real knowledge of the Word of God. “The power of this reference does not lie in itself; it lies in that to which it refers.” (I/1/197) Barth’s presupposition indeed presupposes that this event is possible –but the “reference has just as much force as the promise if true and the future of God is certain.” (ibid.) “In no respect, then, does the force of our reference lie in our hands.” (ibid.) Cartesian (and Thomist, Kantian, or Modernist) arguments over presupposition cannot be stopped by this reference; “the power with which their mouth must be stopped is not under our control.” (ibid.) When Barth makes this two-fold affirmation (to the Word of God, to the concrete human), its power (insofar as it has any) is not his own. “If it is real, is does not lie itself, not even in the seriousness or sincerity, nor the existential participation, with which we make it; it lies in the real thing affirmed therewith.” (I/1/198) The relevance of Barth’s argument is founded on the affirmation that “God’s Word is no mere thing; it is the living, personal, and free God.” (ibid.)
In short the Word of God is a personal event (the personal event) that happens to a specific human at a specific time and place in specific circumstances and it is nevertheless unmistakably other and irreversibly confers with it its own ability to be heard and known by that specific human. No wonder Barth’s theology is frustrating to those who seek general propositions and conditions.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, April 2020