3. The Word of God and Experience (Part 2)
Barth turns to “what the experience of God’s Word, i.e., the determination of the whole self-determining [human] by God’s Word, might then consist.” (I/1/204) In brief he answers: acknowledgement (Anerkennung): “I am aware of no word relatively so appropriate as this one to the nature of the Word of God whose determinative operation is our present concern. (I/1/205). Barth rarely uses the first-person singular pronoun in the main text (much more often in the excursus), and its use here indicates the extend of his personal investment in using acknowledgment.
To develop the concept, Barth relates the nine points of orientation on the nature of the Word of God that were stated and explained in §5 –part of Barth’s architectural achievement now comes into view. It is rather like speaking in a small space which unexpectedly has a very large resonance, as though one were in the corner of an old, high stone church.
1. The word acknowledgement entails first the concept of knowledge (Anerkennung, Erkentnis).(ibid.) “The Word of God is primarily and predominantly speech, communication from person to person and reason to reason spirit, a rational event, the Word of truth, because it is addressed to the human ratio, by which one is not to understand the intellect alone, yet at any rather the intellect also and not last of all.” (ibid.) This correlates with Barth’s discussion of the Word of God as the speech of God, both spiritual and physical, primarily spiritual and “for the sake of it and without prejudice to it, it is also a physical and natural event.”(I/1/135) “Speech, including God’s speech, is the form in which reason communicates with reason and person with person . . . . Reason with reason, person with person, is primarily analogous to what happens in the spiritual realm of creation, not the natural and physical realm. The Word of God . . . is a rational and not an irrational event.” (ibid.) Barth here includes reason, mind, ratio as broadly considered, in the whole person who is determined, in his or her self-determination, by the Word of God.
2. God’s Word involves a relation of a human as person to another person, “naturally, the person of God.” The acknowledged “fact” of relation differs in kind from ordinary, natural facts; “But the kind of fact one acknowledges is not a fact of nature.”(I/1/205) This acknowledge fact is indeed “created and presented by a person or persons” but in a particular sense, “The determination of man’s existence by the Word of God is created thus; it is determination by God’s person.” (ibid.) This additional reason for calling this person-to-person experience acknowledgement resonates with Barth’s discussion, “God’s Word means that God speaks . . . . It is the truth as it is God’s speaking person, Dei loquentis persona.”(I/1/136) God speaks in concretissimo, which “cannot as such be either anticipated or repeated.”(I/1/137) “The equation of God’s Word and God’s Son makes it radically impossible to say anything doctrinaire in understanding the Word of God.”(ibid.) It can never be a “fixed sum of revealed propositions” as in Roman Catholic or older Protestant theologies.(ibid.) This is the major theme of personalism in Barth’s theology: “The personalising of the concept of the Word of God . . . . means awareness of the fact that it is person rather than thing or object even if and in so far as it is word, word of Scripture and word of preaching.”(I/1/138)
3. “Acknowledgment relates to a definite control (positive or negative) with respect to the one who acknowledges.” (I/1/205) The human who acknowledges adapts to the meaningfulness of the acknowledgment, approves it, is not just involved with, but accepts it. “Acknowledgement of God’s word relates to the purposiveness of God’s Word, to its content as the Word of the Lord.” (ibid.) In very specific senses a human approves this Word, accepts its content as truth valid for him or her. It is avowal and submission to the purposes of God, “of ‘the God with us’ that the Word of God has to tell its hearers.”(ibid.) The purposiveness of the Word of God, let it be remembered, is its relatedness, its character as address. (I/1/139) “We know it only as a Word that is directed to us and applies to us.” (ibid.) This purposiveness is a free and actual purposiveness and by no means essential to God Himself. “We evaluate this purposiveness correctly only if we understand it as the reality of the love of the God who does not need us but who does not will to be without us, who has directed His regard specifically on us. (I/1/140.) But it is by no means a simple relationship: “What God said and what God will say is always quite different from what we can say and must say to ourselves and others about its content.(I/1/141) It becomes “the Word of God recollected and expect by us in faith, and the Word which was spoken and will be spoken again by God stands over against it afresh in strict sovereignty.”(ibid.)
4. “Acknowledgement of God’s Word must also mean respect for the fact that takes place in God’s Word.”(I/1/205) Barth stresses in its contingent contemporaneity as revelation, Holy Scripture, and Church proclamation: “illic et tunc becomes hic et nunc. Jesus Christ Himself lives in the message of His witnesses …” (I/1/206) Experience of God’s Word is personalist experience of God’s presence which “does not rest on [a human’s] act of recollection but on God’s making himself present, it is acknowledgment of His presence.” (ibid.) This is directly parallel to Barth’s previous enlargement of the concept of contingent contemporaniety (I/1/145 ff.): there are three times: 1) the time of direct, original speech of God Himself in His revelation; 2) the time of witness, the time of prophecy and apostolate, of the rise of the Canon [of Scripture] as a concrete counterpart in which the Church receives its norm; 3) the specific time of the Church itself, the time of derivative proclamation related tot he words of the prophets and apostles and regulated by them. “These are different times distinguished not only by the difference in periods and contents, not only by the remoteness of centuries and the disparity in the [humans] of different centuries and millennia, but distinguished by the different attitude of God to [humans].” (I/1/145) All three are the Word of God, but in the second and third repeated; to emphasize a difference of quantity rather than quality of these times is to humanize the concept of the Word of God so that it becomes merely used in quotation marks: “Distinctions immanent in history, no matter how seriously they are taken as such, cannot justify a serious use of the concept of God’s Word.” (I/1/144) The distinction of times is one of order only.
. . . [I]n no case can the contemporaneity of modern proclamation with Scripture and revelation be understood as one that we can bring about the eliminating the distinction, by incorporating Scripture and revelation into the life of humanity. It can be understood only as an expression of the fact that god’s Word is itself God’s act. It has nothing directly to do with the general problem of historical understanding. . . . When God’s Word is heard and proclaimed, something takes place that for all our hermeneutical skill cannot be brought about by huermeneutical skill. (I/1/147-148)
Contingent contemporaneity emphasizes “the fact that it has the character of an act, an event.” (I/1/149) Thus moving from revelation to Scripture to proclamation cannot “be volatilized into the general truth of a fixed ore continuous relation between the three forms. It is really a step which has actuality only as this or that specific step, as a contingent act.” (ibid.) “The problem of God’s Word is that this specific revelation of God is granted to this specific [human] to-day through the proclamation of this other specific [human] by means of this specific biblical text, so that a specific illic et tunc becomes a specific hic et nunc.” (ibid.)
5. Acknowledgement also brings with it “the relation to a control, a necessity. We have to remember that the Word of god has power . . . the power of God’s truth, the power of His promise, claim, judgement and blessing which are its content, but power.” (I/1/206). To have experience of God’s Word is to yield to its supremacy: “it does not break [a human]; it really bends him, brings him into conformity with itself.” (ibid.) This recalls that “God’s Word is God’s act implies . . . its power to rule. God’s speech is His action in relation to those to whom He speaks.” (I/1/149) “[W]hen and where the ‘God with us’ is said to us by God Himself, we under a lordship.” (ibid.) Spoken in concretissimo, God’s Word tells a human that he is not his own, but God’s. “It is the transposing of a human into the wholly new state of one who has accepted and appropriate the promise, so that irrespective of his attitude to it he no longer lives without this promise but with it.” (I/1/152) As such “the power of the Word of God in itself as as such is absolute power.” (I/1/153) Mutatis mutandis human considerations never simply humanize this Word; “history and society stand apart from all this, unaffected, sovereign, following their own laws, and the Church must come as it were from the outside, from a God who has remained alien to this cosmos.” (I/1/154-155) Revelation is not (with Schleiermacher) “the distinctive beginning of the religion that is our own:” (I/1/155) “What the Word says stands whatever the world’s attitude to ti and whether it redound to it for salvation or perdition. . . . The world, then, cannot evolve into agreement with God’s Word on its own initiative nor can the Church achieve this by its work in and on the world.” (ibid.)
6. “Acknowledgement certainly means decision”: in the first instance, God’s free decision for humans according to God’s good pleasure: “it is again God’s good pleasure how it comes to [a human]: whether for grace or judgment.” (I/1/206) Secondarily, the “experience of the Word of God is experience of the divine freedom and choice, and therefore it is itself decision, decision concerning [sic] man which is manifested as the characterising of man’s decision as the decision for faith or unbelief, for obediences or disobedience.” (ibid.) Barth clearly moves the definition of decision from a human act to primarily God’s act and a human in response. This recalls Barth’s understanding of the Word of God’s as the act of God, as fundamentally different from human acts of decision in nature and history. “The Word of God is not to be understood as history first and then and as such decision too. It is to be understood primarily and basically as decision and then and as such as history too.” (I/1/156) It is by God’s choice “that the Word of God is identical with the humanity of Christ, Holy Scripture, and proclamation, and is thus a temporal event. Both together, the choice and the event, make the Word of God the act of God.” (I/1/157)
7. In the concept of acknowledgement, the act of acknowledging “means halting before an enigma, acquiescence in a situation which is not open but which is unexplained from the standpoint of the one who does the acknowledging.”(I/1/207) Barth here refers to his characterization of the secularity of the Word of God: it comes in a form which also means its concealment. “Experience of God’s Word . . . must also consist in the fact that we receive it in this form and his concealment, this twofold indirectness. . . . It will have a secular form, the form of all kinds of human acts, and this form will be its concealment, its ambivalence.”(ibid.) Without such necessary ambivalence there can be no experience of God’s Word, which always consists in respect for and acknowledgement of the mystery of God’s Word. Barth here brings forward his characterization of secularity of the Speech of God as the Mystery of the Word of God in §5. “The self-presentation of God in His Word is not comparable with any other self-presentation,” which involves directness, a certain similarity between matter and form.(I/1/166) “This is the very thing that is rule out in the case of God’s Word. It’s form is not suitable but an unsuitable medium for God’s self-presentation. It does not correspond to the matter but contradicts it. It does not unveil but veils it.” (ibid.) Barth takes seriously the utter abandonment of sin: “The place where God’s Word is revealed is objectively and subjectively the cosmos in which sin reigns. The form of God’s Word, then, is in fact the form of the cosmos which stands in contradiction to God. It has a little ability to reveal God to us as we have to see God in it.” (ibid.) God must act in the reality that contradicts God, and therefore concealment and ambivalence is necessary. Such secularity “is in fact an authentic and inalienable attribute of the Word of God itself.” (I/1/168) We cannot know God without that veil, “The truth is . . . that God veils Himself and that in so doing . . . He unveils Himself.” (ibid.) Thus knowledge of God cannot take place through the analogia entis (Barth’s recurring target in Roman Catholic theology). “In its very secularity it is thus in every respect a Word of grace.”(I/1/169) Experience of God’s Word “will always consist also in respect for, an acknowledgment of, the mystery of this Word.” (I/1/207)
8. Barth stresses that “acknowledgment of the mystery of God in His Word is at issue” (note the slightly varied order from the more frequent “Word of God” formulation). (ibid.) Acknowledgment denotes “an act or movement of [a human’s] part, a movement which only as it is made is the acknowledgment required, so that is cannot be resolved into an attitude.” (ibid.) Barth phrases this very carefully: “an act or movement . . . which only as it is made is the acknowledgment required.” This is an instance of Barth’s occassionalist aspect: the Word of God is an event, and acknowledgment of this event involves an act or movement which is only truly acknowledgment during and while such acknowledgment is offered –and hence cannot persist as an attitude, quality, or achievement. The formation of such an attitude is prevented by Barth’s reminder of the one-sidedness of the Word of God (and he specifically refers to §5). The “total” veiled/unveiled (or unveiled/veiled) Word of God always encounters us each time as “something specific” (or in concretissimo), and encounters humans in its veiling and now in its unveiling (or unveiling and now in its veiling) not as a unity of the two, but always moving towards “a complete Word of God.” (ibid.) Such acknowledgment:
necessarily means letting oneself be continually led, always making a step, always being in movement from the experience felt at one time or the though grasped at one time to the opposite experience and thought, because hearing of God’s Word always consists in also hearing the one in the other and the other in the one. (ibid.)
Note not the hearing (immediately above) but simply the event hearing, and hearing the veiled in the unveiled, and the unveiled in the veiled. Such acknowledgment in the one-sidedness of the Word of God is never a persisting attitude or stance but always a transitory movement, an event in a sort of yin-and-yang which always seeks completion but never, from the human side, simply achieves it. It “cannot be arrested by any synthesis.” (ibid.) Barth’s reference to §5 (I/1/171-179) includes such hearing as “the theologia crucis.” (I/1/179)
So in this discipline by His Word, which never leaves us alone whether in our humility or our pride, God is faithful to Himself and to us, always, then, in an unequivocal one-sided advance or retreat in which the other side remains unsaid and everything depends on our hearing it either way as said by God.” (ibid.)
“As said by God” –such “external” onesidedness is not apparent to us, and this onesidedness “makes faith faith.” (I/1/181, my italics) Such faith in a movement “that makes it the apprehended apprehension” (note the movement, not the state) “. .. of the ever invisible God who is beyond all experience and thought. (ibid.) From the Word of God faith has not only its existence but also this its nature. (ibid., italics added) In such movement a human “acknowledges the mystery of the Word of God and . . . has Christian experience.” (I/1/207)
9. Finally, acknowledgment when it takes places is a yielding, a submission before the thing or person that a person acknowledges. This is (at present) highly unpopular language, but Barth hastens to say that it does not destroy a human’s act of self-determination. “It has found its beginning, its basis in another, higher determination.” (ibid.)
In the act of acknowledgment, the life of a human, without ceasing to be the self-determining life of this human, has now its centre, its whence, the meaning of its attitude, and the criterion whether this attitude really has the corresponding meaning–it has all this outside itself, in the thing or person acknowledged. . . . Thus acknowledge as an attitude is in every respect the act of this human and yet from the standpoint of the meaning of the attitude it is not at all [sic] his act but a determination that has come upon him from the thing or person acknowledged by him and compelling his acknowledgment. (I/1/207-208)
Thus the center of experience is a human’s experience and yet far more, an experience determined and enabled by a center outside of a human, before which a human freely yields.
Barth here confronts us with what he called in §5 the spirituality of the Word of god, “the grounding not only of its being spoken but also of its being really heard by [a human] in the Word itself, the appropriation of God’s Word as a gift of the Holy Spirit, and therefore as the Word’s own act on [a human.]” (I/1/208) Such acknowledgement merely seeks to be the answer to a “recognition” (God’s recognition of a human “–at this frontier even the meaning of the word must change–which has come to a human from beyond all its own acts or power, or which the human himself is not the subject, but in whore free truth and reality he must be acknowledged if he is to acknowledge its truth and reality.” (ibid.)
Barth concludes this section, “by taking place as an experience this experience ceases to be experience.”(ibid.) Barth raises the concept of faith in the final section as the consequence of acknowledgment, “to indicate the point where [the possibility of human knowledge of the Word of God] must finally be left open.” (ibid.) “[E]xperience of God’s Word is possible, but that in respect of its meaning and basis, its final seriousness and true content, its truth and reality, it is not experience but more than experience.” (ibid.) Barth further specifies, “We have described this experience . . . in the form of a conclusion from our earlier understanding of the nature of the Word of God, by mentioning a series of acts which with the partial exception of the frontier instance at the end [no. 9] can all be claimed as fully human acts possible to [a human.]” (I/1/209)
This central section of Barth’s treatment of “The Word of God and Experience” is an exhaustive (exhausting?) description of the concept of acknowledgment as the central aspect and content of any possible human experience of the Word of God. The scope of Barth’s architectural achievement in the Church begins to come to light, and his powerful coherence of event, act, person, and God’s initiative and initiating grace. Barth re-frames “experience” away from psychological speculation and towards what can be known in the Church on the basis of God’s word in revelation, Scripture, and proclamation. Psychological (neuro-psychological) explanations of religious experience, then may change freely, necessarily, and often without implicating or denying the central importance of God’s prior recognition of the human in a human’s acknowledge of the Word of God.
Rev. and page numbers corrrected, April 2020