3. The Word of God and Experience (Part 1)
This is a very important section for Barth and marks his theological departure from a very important element of Modernist Protestant theology in his time, the analysis of experience (Erlebnis). Both the care he expended on this text, and its complexity, suggest that Barth was carefully working through perilous issues to preserve his understanding of the personal, eventful, living Word of God in Jesus Christ.
Because this entire section is so central, I will treat it in three successive blog entries, since the text its divides into three major sections.
This first section focuses on Barth’s understanding of the Word of God as determinative of the whole of a specific human’s existence. “If knowledge of God’s Word is possible, this must mean that an experience of God’s Word is possible.” (I/1/198) Knowledge is “the confirmation of human acquaintance with an object whereby its truth becomes determinative of the existence of the man who has knowledge.” (ibid.) In the German, this is Kenntnis and not mere Wissen. “By the experience of God’s Word which is possible for humans on the presupposition of its reality, we understand the determination of their existence as humans by God’s Word.” (I/1/199)
Barth’s primary point is that this determination (“if there is such a determination of human experience by God’s Word”) –this determination is not to be confused with determination a human can give to his or her own existence. Barth uses “self-determination” here in the sense that a human being chooses his or her own orientation to existence, whether he or she is open to a god (any god), and whether he or she embraces freedom, conscience, and existence –Kierkegaardian self-determination (but without a footnote!). “Naturally experience of the Word of God always takes place in an act of human self-determination.” (ibid.) But Barth articulates his usual Nein: “But it is not experience of the Word of God as this act. No determination a human can give himself [sic] is as such determination by God’s Word.” (ibid.)
At this crucial junction –the point of contact between a specific human in concretissimo and God (one of the points where in Barth’s metaphor the divine tangent intersects the human circle –my interpretation and not Barth’s language here), Barth characteristically finds both simultaneity and difference –the human does indeed experience the Word of God in his or her self-determination– but this self-determination and experience of the Word of God is the act of an utterly free and gracious God.
This experience and knowledge “emanate” (what a curious word!) only “the only competent witness in this matter, namely the [human] who stands in the event of real knowledge of the Word of God as this [human] is presented to us by Holy Scripture.” (ibid.) Other “theories” of the encounter “emanate from an onlooker who is interested in the event but only from the outside” whose “main interest” is “in some way to maintain the self-determination of man [sic] in the face of the determination of man by God.”(I/1/200) This onlooker “fails to see” in his or her position outside the encounter “that the co-existence of God and [a human] as it occurs in the experience of God’s Word is not a co-existence on the same level” and the onlooker’s position does not allow such regard (sight) as “from a higher vantage point.”(ibid.) There is, to change the metaphor, no Archimedean position from which one can appraise the circle and the line that forms the tangent.
The external observer completely “overlooks the fact that there can be point in trying to maintain” human “self-determination in some way, even dialectically, over against the determination … by God.”(ibid.) Exactly as human self-determination it is subject to God’s determination and in order to be experience of God’s Word “our very self-determination needs this determination by God.”(ibid.) It is a relation of total subjection and need vis-à-vis determination by God. Other theological models cannot account for this radical determination: not Pelagius (“cannot possibly replace this”), nor the Semi-Pelagian position (“co-operate with it”) or be “secretly identical” as human self-determination with God’s determination (“as Augustine wished”). (ibid.) Such solutions may be generally applicable to other instances of determination of other objects, “but here, whether it is a matter of the determination of man [sic] by God and by himself, they are impossible.”(ibid.)
The uniqueness of such an encounter, truly visible only by the human participant, might be called “utter dependence,” the language of Schleiermacher’s concept. This seems to help but mis-conceives the encounter: “If God is seriously involved in the experience of the Word of God, then” a human “is just as seriously involved too.”(ibid.) The very human “who stands in real knowledge of the Word of God also knows” himself or herself “as existing in his [her] self-determination.” (ibid.) As this human “comes before us in the biblical promise,” the Word comes as a summons and its hearing finds “the right hearing of obedience of the worng hearing of disobedience.” (I/1/201)
Whether obedience or disobedience “is not, of course” in a human’s hands.(ibid.) As a human decides, resolves, and determines, he or she “is rather in the secret judgment of the grace of disfavour of God, to whom alone his obedience or disobedience is manifest.”(ibid., italics added) This is the overlapping determination by God which befalls a human’s self-determination. “Nevertheless, it does not alter the fact that his [sic] hearing is self-determination, act, decision.”(ibid.) This co-existence of God and the human in a human’s experience of God’s Word “is not on the same plane” and “cannot be viewed in the same way as that of two other entities.”(ibid.) The outside spectator who tries to see and judge from a higher vantage point has no understanding of the matter at all. “Our very self-determination here is subject to determination by God” and “needs determination by God in order to be experience of His Word.”(ibid.)
Barth holds a unity, a simultaneity, which he refuses to resolve into opposition, replacement, or dialectic. “The fact that this happens to” human self-determination “and what happens to it, is not the word of human self-determination. But conversely it is the work of human self-determination to which this happens, no matter what else may happen to it therewith.” (ibid.)
This becomes clearer if two of Barth’s unusually complex sentences is more clearly laid out than in line-by-line text:
“If human self-determination were not as it were:
- the material which is subject
- and in need
when we speak of the determination of human existence by the Word of God,
then how could we speak of
- the determination of human existence
- of indeed of a determination by God’s Word
in any sense?” (ibid.)
“If God’s Word is not spoken to animals, plants, and stones but to humans,
and
if determination by God’s Word is really a determination of human existence,
in what, then, will it consist [?]
if not in the fact that
- the self-determination in which [sic] man is man finds its absolute superior in determination by God,
- that as self-determination, and without in the least being affected or even destroyed altogether as such
[then]
- it receives a direction,
- is set under a judgement
- and has impressed upon it a character
in short
- it is determined in the way that a self-determining is by a word
- and that that man is by the Word of God. (ibid.)
“When this is clear,” Barth next writes (“clear!”), the way is open for a more precise explanation of our statement that humans can have experience of God’s Word. . . . At this stage three points should be relatively easy to perceive.” (ibid.)
- Barth refuses to locate such experience in any one human factor or faculty, but rather in or through all of them: will, conscience, feeling, “all . . . as possibilities of human self-determination and then understand them in their totality.” (I/1/202)
- No “anthropological centre” (faculty, factor) can be dis-allowed, least of all intellect — Barth specifically disallows the facile anti-intellecutalism which has come to mark a certain kind of Protestant theology.
- “Nor is there any need … to assert any unusual of hidden anthropological centres as the basis of the possibility of human experience of God’s Word” (I/1/203) –and here Barth means depth psychology: “So far as they can be claimed at all as human possibilities, they are rational possibilities in the broadest sense of the term. Their hiddenness and strangeness certainly do not qualify them as points of entry for the determination of humans by God’s Word.”(I/1/204)
Barth summarizes: “human existence mens human self-determination.” (ibid.) Determination by God’s Word of human existence, and human self-determination, involves all human faculties without emphasis on any and without repudiation of any. “The decisive point materially . . . is that it is a determination of the whole self-determining human.” (ibid.)
Barth’s emphasis upon simultaneity, existential personal embrace and specificity, and the Word spoken in concretissimo leads him to say Nein! to previous misunderstandings of any specific human’s experience of the Word of God, and Yes! to its utter uniqueness as determined in all humanness that that which is utterly superior to and transcends all humanness.
Of what does such experience of God’s Word then consist? Barth turns to an affirmative answer in the second of the three parts of this vital section of his first volume of Church Dogmatics.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, April 2020