2. The Root of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Post 1)
Barth has argued that to understand, or even comprehend, revelation, one has to come to terms with the doctrine of the Trinity. His terminology is precise and consistent: The concept (Offenbargunsbegriff) is the root of the doctrine (Trinitätslehre). Revelation is very clear in Scripture: “God’s revelation is God’s own direct speech which is not to be distinguished from the act of speaking and therefore is not to be distinguished from God Himself, from the divine I which confronts man in this act in which it says Thou to him. Revelation is Dei loquentis persona.” (I/8/304)
Barth loved this Latin phrase, drawn immediately from Calvin’s discussion that Scripture must be confirmed by the witness of the Spirit rather than the judgement of the [Catholic] church, in Institutio Christian religionis 1.VII.4: summa Scripturae probatio passim a Dei loquentis persona sumitur (the supreme proof of Scripture everywhere is summed up as the Person of God speaking [or: God in person speaking]). This in turn arises from passages such as Deut. 4:33 Num audierit ullus populus vocem Dei loquentis e medio ignis ut tu audisti, & vixerit (Beza’s translation, properly by [Immanuel Tremelius and Franciscus Junius], as printed in Amsterdam, 1669). For Barth as for Calvin, to read Scripture is to invoke the witness of the Spirit.
Since in God’s revelation God’s Word is identical with God Himself [sic], God’s revelation has “no higher or deeper ground above or below it but is an absolute ground in itself, and therefore for man a court from which there can be no possible appeal to a higher court.” (I/1/305). God’s revealing Word in itself —strictly and properly true only of revelation—is self-authenticating; this differentiates it (and God) from the witness of prophets and apostles, and of the interpretations of expositors and preachers. Barth’s understanding of Word is as Event: as a witness both in itself and for us grounded through itself “Revelation has become an event” which can happen and must happen if Scripture and proclamation are to become God’s Word.(ibid.)
Barth sums up: God reveals Himself [sic] as the Lord. While this must be regarded as an analytic judgement, revelation as an event admits no second question about its content: form and content are the identical in the event. In all circumstances revelation is “the promulgation of the βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ, of the lordship of God.” (I/1/306) All is in relation to the recipient, the one who experiences the Event: “To be Lord means being what God is in His revelation to [a human]. To act as Lord means to act as God in His revelation acts on [a human].” (ibid.). Through revelation a human knows that there is a Lord, and this human has a Lord, and that this Lord is God. “Lordship is present in revelation because its reality and truth are so fully self-grounded . . . because it is revelation through itself and not in relation to something else, because it is that self-contained novum. Lordship means freedom: God’s freedom, ontic and noetic autonomy. (I/1/306—307).
God himself in this freedom speaks as an I and addresses as a Thou. God “is the ground without grounds, with whose word and will man can only begin without asking Why, so that in and with this he may receive everything that deserves to be called true and good.” (ibid.) “According to the Bible God’s being with us is the event of revelation.” (ibid.)—and it is no coincidence that God’s being with us is Emmanuel. God reveals Godself as Lord; revelation attested by Scripture “we call the root of the doctrine of the Trinity.” (But this is not to say: its branches!). This implies two additional points.
First, the “statement or statements about God’s Trinity cannot claim to be directly identical with the statement about revelation or with revelation itself.” (I/1/308). The doctrine of the Trinity is an analysis of this statement: it is a human interpretation. As a theologico-dogmatic explication it is not identical with one of part of the text of the biblical witness to revelation. The result is not simple verbal repetition. “To explain what is there it sets something new over against what is there. We have in view this difference from revelation and Scripture, which the Church and theology must be aware of in their own work, when we call our statement about revelation . . . merely the root of the doctrine of the Trinity.” (ibid.)
On the other hand, positively (and second), “to call revelation the root of the doctrine of the Trinity is also to say that the statement or statements about the Trinity of God purport to be indirectly, though not directly, identical with the statement about revelation.” (I/1/309). Barth rejects the implied narrative of liberal Protestantism: that “a first age, which we may call biblical, had faith without revelation or knowledge of the Triune God,” imperfectly clarified monotheism; “then there came a second age, let us say that of the early Church, which for various reasons thought it should give to the same faith a trinitarian formulation in the sense of the dogma,” the patristic and medieval interpreters, so “we now stand in a third age, the modern period, for which the Bible and the dogma are both records of the faith of past ages in face of which we are free to express our own faith either in the same way or not.” Dogma is a necessary and relevant analysis of revelation; but “Bible can no more contain the dogma of the Trinity explicitly than it can contain other dogmas explicitly.” (I/1/310). The Biblical witness was given in a specific historical situation, but it does not confront the successes and errors of church history: its witness to revelation is not just the record of the faith of a given time. While it may reflect that time in which it occurred, “it is also the authority by which faith must always let itself be measured, and can be measured, irrespective of the difference of times.” The truth of a dogma is whether we can regard it as a good interpretation of the Biblical witness.
“In calling revelation the root of the doctrine of the Trinity we are thus indicating that we do not confuse or equate the biblical witness to God in His revelation with the doctrine of the Trinity.” (I/1/311) There is nonetheless an authentic and well-established connection between the doctrine and the witness. The work must be done now as it was long ago; the text of the doctrine of the Trinity must “become for us a commentary that we have to make use of in expounding the bible and therefore in employing the dogmatic criterion.” The point? The basis or root of the doctrine of the Trinity lies in revelation. Therein lies its legitimacy.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not merely an interpretation of revelation, but is a means of understanding God who reveals, in the persons of the Trinity, both indivisible and distinct. “What we do in fact gather from the doctrine of the Trinity is who the God is who reveals Himself, and this is why we present the doctrine here as an interpretation of revelation.” (I/1/312) This revelation is not the basis of the Trinity, but of the doctrine of the Trinity, and the doctrine has no other basis than the revelation. “What we do in fact gather from the doctrine of the Trinity is who the God is who reveals Himself, and this is why we present the doctrine here as an interpretation of revelation.” (ibid.) Further, “we find revelation itself attested in Holy Scripture in such a way that in relation to this witness our understanding of revelation, or of the God who reveals Himself, must be the doctrine of the Trinity.” This is the case both for those few instances of explicit reference, and for those many cases of implicit reference or ground, “in a whole of implicit reference.” (I/1/314)
“God reveals Himself as the Lord; in this statement we have summed up our understanding of the form and content of the biblical revelation.” (ibid.) In a three-fold and unified sense, “we see something that can only be conjectured as highly probable on the basis of the passages adduced, namely, that this statement is in fact the “root” of the doctrine of the Trinity.” Hence the problems of the doctrine of the Trinity are prefigured in the revelation attested in Scripture; the schema of “revealer, revelation, revealing” (subject, predicate, object) “corresponds to the logical and material order both of biblical revelation and also of the doctrine of the Trinity.” The material order in particular “has on the one side [revelation] a specific historical centre and the doctrine of the Trinity has on the other side a specific historical occasion in biblical revelation.” The true (or important) theme is the second concept (Begriff): “God’s action in His revelation,” and the real interest of the doctrine of the Trinity. “ere too the theme is primarily the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, the deity of Christ.” (I/1/315). The question of the identity of the Father is on one side, and the question of the Spirit of the Father and the Son is on the other. ” At any rate, the historical development of the doctrine of the Trinity out of the witness to revelation followed this route, and this is the route we must now take.”(ibid.)
Barth now introduces to his argument three points that flow from the repetition of one assertion, “Revelation in the Bible means the self-unveiling, imparted to men, of the God who by nature cannot be unveiled to men.” (ibid.; my bold type for consistency below)
In the first instance, the Bible speaks of revelation “in the form of the record of a history or a series of histories. The content of this history or of each of these histories, however, is that self-unveiling of God.” (ibid.). This self-unveiling is to specific men: “But what does self-unveiling mean here?” God does what humans cannot do or discover in any way: “He makes Himself present, known and significant to them as God.” In a very specific time and place, God makes himself known to human discourse (contemplation, experience, thought, and speech). This occurs truly and concretely, without metaphor: God with us! (I/1/316) “He takes form, and this taking form is His self-unveiling. It is not impossible nor is it too petty a thing for Him to be His own alter ego in His revelation.” Barth sees a divine distinction, this “means something new in God, a self-distinction of God from Himself, a being of God in a mode of being that is different from though not subordinate to His first and hidden mode of being as God, in a mode of being, of course, in which He can also exist for us.” (ibid.). God is Gods-self both in concealment and in revelation. That God “can and will and actually does do this we now understand as a confirmation of our first statement that God reveals Himself [sic] as the Lord.” (I/1/320). In this case the Lordship means the freedom of God to differentiate Godself from Godself, God the Father, God the Son. “This Sonship is God’s lordship in His revelation.”(ibid.)
In the second instance, Barth emphasizes the second part of the key sentence (as above). “Inscrutability, hiddenness, is of the very essence of Him who is called God in the Bible.” We encounter Barth’s great theme of the poles of the hidden-ness and revealed-ness of God: “It is thus of the very nature of this God to be inscrutable to man. In saying this we naturally mean that in His revealed nature He is thus inscrutable. It is the Deus revelatus who is the Deus absconditus, the God to whom there is no path nor bridge, concerning whom we could not say nor have to say a single word if He did not of His own initiative meet us as the Deus revelatus.” (I/1/321). God remains free, “even in the form He assumes when He reveals Himself God is free to reveal Himself [sic] or not to reveal Himself.” (ibid.). Here is no modalism: “The fact that God takes form does not give rise to a medium, a third thing between God and [a human], a reality distinct from God that is as such the subject of revelation. . . .God’s self-unveiling remains an act of sovereign divine freedom.” (ibid.) God’s mystery cannot be grasped or confiscated or put to work. “God is always a mystery.(I/1/322). God’s revelation in no manner slights His mystery; God assumes form in such a manner than no form can encompass Him. Even as God reveals, God remains free not to reveal. “This His new self-giving remains [humans’] only hope.” (I/1/324). Too often human expression (especially that of liberal Protestantism) has meant an empowering of humans “but at best must become a partner and at worst a tool of the religious [human].” (ibid.) In Trinitarian language, “God the Father is God who always, even in taking form in the Son, does not take form, God as the free ground and the free power of His being God in the Son.”(ibid.)
In the third instance of Barth’s key sentence, he focuses upon the words, “imparted to [humans].”(ibid.). Where does this revelation go to? It is a highly specific location: “Part of the concept of the biblically attested revelation is that it is a historical event.” But not in the usual meaning of “historical” (historisch not geschichtliche—the translators require reference to the German text here). The usual sense is of a provable event apprehensible by a neutral observer —but in this case the observer would see the form but miss the significance. In the Bible revelation is “a concrete relation to concrete [humans].” (I/1/325) “It is rather the record of an event that has taken place once and for all, i.e., in a more or less exact and specific time and place.”(ibid.) —whether or not human culture at the time had any sense of historisch.” Similarly the revelation attested in Scripture has no interest in what moderns call “errors” —what matters is not the correct content but the very fact of the statements. When the Bible gives an account of revelation it narrates a history not of a relationship between God and humans that exists everywhere generally, but “tell[s] of an event that takes place there and only there, then and only then, between God and certain very specific” humans.”(I/1/326) As a specific event it is incomparable and unrepeatable. “To hear the Bible as the witness to God’s revelation is in all cases to hear about this history through the Bible.”(ibid.)
To develop the meaning of “this history,” Barth develops his crucial understanding of saga (as opposed to myth). The matter of saga, explicated in a long excursus (I/1/326-329), deserves its own post (to follow).