3. The Word of God and Experience (Part 3)
Barth never say his famous “No!” without a “Yes!” lurking in the wings, but usually the “No!” comes first. The concluding subsection of this crucial chapter is no exception.
Barth has affirmed that knowledge of the Word of God is possible, and that a human can genuinely know the Word of God in acknowledgement which is both an entirely human experience and beyond experience. He did so on the basis of his prior understanding of the three-fold Word of God as revelation, Scripture, and proclamation, and not “experience” as a psychological study. Barth goes on to ask “whether experience of God’s Word is possible in such a way that by it the store of human possibility is enriched by a further one.” (I/1/209) Barth is concerned lest experience of God’s Word be understood as a possibility resident in illuminati or special prodigies, and as a experience which passes into their hands, “presupposed as a predicate, as a specific characteristic of certain” humans.((I/1/210)
This is a “Cartesian” beginning by which the old tag homo capax verbi Dei (a human as capable of the Word of God) “suddenly comes to life.”(I/1/212) –susceptible to a reality of experience which really passes from God’s hands into the hands of a human, “that a man receives something from God in the sense that it is really put in his hands.” (ibid.) In this understanding “the experience of God’s Word no longer rests on itself; it has become an ellipse instead of a circle, and one of the poles, the one nearer us and opposite god, is the human who has the experience.” (I/1/213). Barth rejects this understanding, this “indirect Cartesianism” (an American might have called it second-hand Cartesianism).
Barth repeats: “the Word of God is the criterion of the Church, Church proclamation, and dogmatics.”(I/1/214-215) The whole relation of the Church (and its proclamation, and hence dogmatics) is a stake here: “can we be sure we can really find . . . the possibility of knowledge that corresponds to the real knowledge of the Word of God?”(I/1/215) “Can we say with final human certainty that this is so? Can we put out hand in the fire for it?” (ibid.) The answer must be Nein! –otherwise the essential veiled/unveiled ambiguity of human experience of the Word of God is fatally compromised. That way lies “a society of stirred partisans seeking to stir others” –in 1932 Germany not a throw-away line.(I/1/216) Only by acknowledging that “in the case of the possibility of the knowledge of the Word of God the situation is quite different” can the “insuperable difficulty which proves to be the end of all yes, all certainty in such assertion” be understood correctly.(ibid.)
When Barth uses a metaphor, it is usually gives notice of his clinching his argument –so it is here. “When we try to find the content of divine Spirit in the (pardoned) consciousness of man, are we not like the man who wanted to scoop out in a sieve the reflection of the beautiful silvery moon from the pond.” (ibid.) His image beautifully captures the reflective, living, elusive nature of experience of God’s Word: “a human process of a very characteristic and differentiated and at the same time comprehensive kind. Because this process is indeed present and may be lived, asserted, and described, we speak of the possibility of human experience of the Word of God.” (ibid.) Who guarantees that a human is a faithful mirror? to extend Barth’s metaphor. If an “ascertainable human possibility” is available, Christianity will be reduced “to the sphere of general religious history in which there are no doubts hills and valleys but no heaven.” (I/1/217)
The human “engaged in this act” (interpretation of experience), “who is to be a witness here and whose self-understanding must decide, must be the human we know from the promise. Only this human can tell us about the possibility that corresponds to real experience of the Word of God.” (I/1/218)
My self-understanding can be significant here only to the degree that I understand myself as confronted with the promise, i.e. with the Word of God as it encounters me in revelation, Scripture, and proclamation, only to the degree that I see myself in the specific light that falls upon my existence from this. Analysis of my self-understanding here can only mean appealing to what the promise tells every man about himself.”[sic] (ibid.)
Barth refers to the tag infinitum non capax infiniti –the finite (human) cannot bear the infinite (the Word of God.)(I/1/220) “In what acknowledgement of God’s Word in our experience . . . can there be anything like a sure and necessary correspondence to the Word of God? If there really is, then it is in virtue of the acknowledgment which a human cannot achieve and therefore cannot assert, but which comes by grace upon . . . work that is corrupt and dead through sin, for Christ’s sake and not for the sake of his inner disposition.” (ibid.)
Barth here finds the frontier of human experience: “this is the new land which opens up when one does not just consider Christian experience as a phenomenon but lets it speak for itself.” (I/1/222). This “far side is to be understood as a genuine and immutable far side which cannot be changed into this side.”(ibid.) This is the crucial ambiguity.
Human experience of God’s Word will never be able to see, perceive or understand itself, if it is real, as determined by the Word of God. It will be this without seeing or understanding itself in this being . . . a new, regenerate human will arise in the act of this acknowledgment as the human whom God has addressed and who hears God, unknown, of course, to himself (herself) and others, in a newness that cannot be ascertained.” (ibid.)
This is a miracle before the eyes of every human –secular and religious, Jew and Greek.
Finally, God’s Word comes as a free Word. “In this event the possibility of God’s Word comes into view for us . . . as it is actualised, as we have knowledge of God’s Word, as our self-determination is determined by God. . . . The knowability of the Word of God stands or falls, then with the act of its real knowledge, which is not under our control.” (I/1/224) Barth concludes his argument “in the circle of promise and faith in which is no Yes and No but only Yes.” (I/1/226-227) Experience of the Word of God is personal, an event in concretissimo, to a specific human at a specific time and place, and always at the frontier of the human/more than human experience/more than experience, the frontier of the new life in Christ.
It has taken me more than a year to read and understand Barth’s fundamental and explosive critique of almost all experience-based Christianity, whether liberal Protestant, post-Vatican II Roman Catholic, or Evangelical. This has been tough going, and I have had to pause to absorb Barth’s radical remembering of the acknowledgment of the Word of God which is not under my control. I hope to be able to conclude this larger §6 with a greater sense of flow.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, April 2020