4. The Word of God and Faith
Barth introduces this final section of §6 reiterating that “at the beginning of this section we said that we could investigate only the knowability and not the knowledge of the God’s Word.” (I/1/227) Strictly speaking, however, Barth’s language has varied but his point remains: to speak very, very accurately: knowledge of God’s Word is no less than the reality of the grace of God, “whose How is as a reality is as hidden from us as God Himself is.” (ibid.)
On our behalf, Barth does not ask how is does happen but how it can happen, which leads him back to the event itself. “The possibility of the knowledge of God is absolutely, implied, and included in the event of its actualization, and our Yes to this possibility is one long reference to this event.” (I/1/227-228) This is not a human production, so what does the reference mean in this context? This event is the event of faith, “the making possible of knowledge of God’s Word that takes place in actual knowledge of it.” (I/1/228) Granting that this event can and must be understood as woven into many other concepts, “if one asks what this reality is in so far as the knowability of God is included within it, the only possible answer which is both accurate and exhaustive is that this reality is faith.” (ibid.) In “the possibility given in faith, we have to understand the knowability of the Word of God,” where “it comes into view, and it is to be sought and found.” (I/1/224)
Barth must further declare three aspects of this faith event which “will yield three different definitions of the concept of the knowability of the Word of God.” (ibid.)
1. “In faith as real experience the acknowledgment of God’s Word, which we have understood to the concrete form of experience by [sic] man is as it were put into effect by the Word of God known.”(I/1/229) This puzzling sentence needs re-reading:
In faith (=real experience of the acknowledgment of God’s Word), further characterized as =the concrete form of experience human –this faith (back to the subject) is put into effect (as it were) by “the Word of God known.”
As it were? Is this a metaphor, a description, or ostensive? However imperfectly, “human action understood as acknowledgment comes into play.”(I/1/230) In faith this is acknowledged acknowledgment –note the circularity– “because what [a human] can do, and does is acknowledged by the acknowledged Word of God.” (ibid.) This is not as complete human self-determination “but as the self-determination determined by God’s Word.” At this point the reader is entitled to ask: so is this human self-determination or isn’t it? –enough of evasion.
Barth qualifies this experience: [this] “experience is not self-evidently real experience,” and “not as experience is faith faith.”(ibid.) The act of acknowledgment “is not as such acknowledgment of the Word of God.”(ibid.) Faith refers to the Word, Christ (the person Christ) “because He presents Himself to” faith “as its object, that makes faith faith, real experience.” Faith is not “faith” because of its reference, but is faith “by the fact that the Word of God is given to us as the object of this reference, as the object of acknowledgment, and therefore as the basis of real faith.” (ibid.) In other words, this is a very special language game (referring to Wittgenstein), and this acknowledgment of this object is sui generis, a human language act unlike any other human language act.
Barth’s seven-page excursus (one of his longer) situates his understanding of “the constitutive significant for faith of the object of faith” in his reading of Anselm’s Proslogion –and implicitly also situates this chapter of Church Dogmatics as a consequence of his exploration of Anselm in Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (1928). Barth’s particular targets in this excursus are Hans Michael Mueller, who apparently questioned whether Anselm was sufficiently Catholic (large-C) and completely misunderstood him. Barth goes on to discuss the wider tradition of faith as determined by its object from certain Thomas Aquinas to Protestant Orthodoxy (Quenstedt), but especially in light of Luther’s teachings on faith and modern liberal mis-understandings of Luther, particular in Wobbermin. Finally Barth discusses the sometimes artificial distinction between fides quae creditur and fides qua creditur (1/1/232) as originated in Augustine and judged by the decisive term fiducia.
Barth summarizes: “the first thing that must be said about the knowability of the Word of God as the possibility given to us in faith is that it arises and consists absolutely in the object of real knowledge.”(I/1/237)
2. “When and where the Word of God is really known by humans the manner of this knowing corresponds to that of the Word of God Itself.” (I/1/242) If “that acknowledgment of God’s Word … is, as it were, brought into force not by itself but by the Word of God acknowledged, so that it is real acknowledgment,” then “in faith [humans] have real experience of the Word of God and no finitum non capax infiniti…” (I/1/238) The human who has such experience is yet a sinner, but that does not invalidate real experience of God’s Word: “it transcends and brackets it.”(ibid.) The possible knowability is only loaned by God, exclusively for use. A human is not thus in some mystical sense deified, but is brought into conformity with the world, however sinful that human may be. Receiving God’s Word means “there is something common to the speaking God and the hearing [human] in this event, a similarity for all the dissimilarity implied between God and [humans], a point of contact … if we may now adopt this term too.” (ibid.)
Barth admits he is only a hair’s breadth from the Roman Catholic doctrine of analogia entis, which he completely rejects.(I/1/239) In faith a human is conformity to God, capable of receiving God’s Word, without any subtraction from the lostness of natural and sinful humanity. As God’s Word is spoken to a human, it is that human, and that human is in the Word. “In the strict sense it is meant only as recollection of the promise and expectation of its future fulfillment.” (I/1/242) The fundamental human lostness and ambiguity remain: “the true believer is the very human who will not hesitate to acknowledge that his or her consciousness of faith as such is human darkness.” (ibid.) It is in this sense concealed: in affirming the divine possibility of summoning human faith, “we can affirm it only in its concealment, in the husk of the human possibility that meets us as darkness . . .”(I/1/243) Barth uses one of his rare metaphors:
We can see the stick dipped in water only as a broken stick. But though we cannot see it, it is invisibly and yet in truth a completely unbroken stick. For all the dissimilarity, the possibility of grasping the promise in faith is not without similarity to the divine possibility of its actualization: not in itself, not as a human possibility, but . . . in terms of its object, as the possibility to grasping the promise. (ibid.)
Barth’s reply to the Roman Catholic doctrine of the analogia entis is not a denial of analogy, but, grounded in Romans 12.6 (ἀναλογία τῆς πίστεως) an appeal to the analogy of faith, the likeness of the known in the knowing, of the object in the thought, of the Word of God in the word that is thought and spoken by man. This is the analogia fidei, “a humans knowledge of God is inverted into a human’s being known by God.” (I/1/244)
3. Finally, a human “exists as a believer wholly and utterly by this object . . . [that human] has not created his own faith; the Word created it. He has not come to faith; faith has come to him through the Word.” (ibid.) Barth rejects the extreme: that human “is not at all a block or stone in faith but self-determining human.” (I/1/245) Barth rejects passivity. “In faith, [the human] must regard this in no sense diminished self-determination, [but] . . . in the living of his own life, as determined by the Word of God.”(ibid.) A human acts as he or she believes, but the fact that that human “believes as he acts is God’s act.” In grace and mercy the Creator encloses and creature and the merciful God the sinful human, “in such a way that [a human] remains subject and yet [a human’s] I as such derives only from the Thou of the subject God.” (ibid., my italics) The older theology called this faith a gift of God, of the Holy Spirit.
In conclusion, “The Word of God becomes knowable by making itself known. The application of what has been said to the problem of knowledge consist in stopping at this statement and not going a single step beyond it.” (I/1/246) The knowability of God’s Word “is really an inalienable affirmation of faith but that precisely as such it denotes the miracle of faith, the miracle that we can only recollect and hope for.”(I/1/247) God is present “as the original subject, as the primary power, as the creator of the possibility of knowledge of God’s Word.” (ibid.) A human must open the door to Christ (Rev. 3.20), but this is the work of Christ who stands outside. “Hence it is also unconditionally true that the risen Christ passes through closed doors. (John 20.19 ff.)” (ibid.)
In this chapter §6, the power of Barth’s architectonic account of Christian theology in terms of person, event, and Word become apparent. His discussion of “knowability” is a terrain chosen by the views of liberal theology of his time, which he vigorously opposed and to which he equally vigorously responded. In the next chapter (§7) Barth returns to his more expository mode, since he has decisively moved away from a psychological understanding of the knowability of God’s Word –an event, a person, a grace, and a gift of the Spirit. First, however, I will take a detour to I/2/17, to discuss –against a backdrop of horrific examples of the abuse of Christianity by its own alleged adherents– the revelation of God as the abolition of Religion (§17).
Rev. and page numbers correct, April 2020