2. The Root of the Doctrine of the Trinity (post 2)
The excursus which appears in the English printed edition 326-329 (and labelled in the online edition as pages 329-331; and in the German pages 352-355) introduces an important line of thinking which Barth will develop further in Vol. 3, The Doctrine of Creation, III/1/81-94. This line of thinking is the literary category of saga, opposed to which is myth. The present excursus (I/1/326-329) is only the beginning this delineation.
In Vol. III Barth’s fundamental task is to understand the biblical account of creation and how it functions as a canon to measure and critique church proclamation. Here in Vol. 1, Barth seeks to clarify how the hidden God speaks not to humanity in general, but “to such and such [humans] in very definite situations. It is a very specific event and as such it is incomparable and cannot be repeated.” (I/1/326). How is the Church to understand the Bible’s proclamation of historical events and individuals to individuals “there and only there, then and only then”? Is this not “historical” (geschichtlich or historisch at this point)? Barth’s answer is to develop his concept of saga.
Barth first seeks to exempt the hearing of history (Geschichte), “an event in the revelation attested in the Bible.” (I/1/326) In the English version, that history “cannot mean regarding such an event as possible, probable, or even actual on the basis of a general concept of historical (geschichtlich) truth.” The German text speaks differently: Das Hören solcher Geschichte, wie der, die in der in der Bibel bezeugten Offenbarung Ereignis ist, kann selbstverständlich nicht bedeuten: ein solches Geschehen auf Grund eines allgemeinen Begriffs von geschichtlicher Wahrheit für möglich, wahrscheinlich oder auch wirklich halten. (KD I/1/352-353). This history cannot be selbverständlich, that marvelous German word for “self-understood,” even “obvious,” as in the solution of a puzzle. Barth grants that such histories (Geschichten) come under this “general concept” (ein allgemeiner Begriff) on the human side in statements in temporal form which are so “assiduously emphasised” in the Bible. These stories do not fall under such a general concept on the divine side. The human, temporal side can neither claim nor deny that at this particular point, God acted on these specific humans. To claim that would be to make a claim to believe in or deny vis-à-vis Biblical witness, something which is beyond the competence of the discipline of History. “Hearing a history such as that enacted in the revelation attested in the Bible cannot be dependent on the “historical” assessment of its temporal form” (ibid.). The judgement issued under the general concept of “the general concept of historical truth is not necessarily the judgment of faith vis-à-vis the biblical witness.” (I/1/327). The decisive question is not one of its general historicity: it can only be of its “special historicity.” (ibid.), or die Frage nach ihrer besonderen Geschichtlichkeit. (KD I/1/353)
What is this “special historicity?” That the biblical narrative ” is to be regarded either as a whole or in part as saga or legend.” (ibid.) or als Sage oder Legende (KD ibid.)
Terminology and a bit of intellectual history is important here. The “general concept of historical truth” to which Barth probably referred was summarized by Leopold von Ranke: wie es eigentlich gewesen (as it really was or happened). This method of history has long since been critiqued as naïve, and the interpretive role of the historian (and of the source material, often) given far more careful evaluation.
When Barth wrote as Sage oder Legende, he communicated a distinction which is easily lost in the English translation. Duden defines Sage (with the -e): ursprünglich mündlich überlieferter Bericht über eine im Einzelnen nicht verbürgte, nicht alltägliche, oft wunderbare Begebenheit (a very old, inherited oral report about a unique and often wondrous event that is not ordinary and not guaranteed in detail). Many stories could be Sage, including a variety within Sage called Saga (with -a). Duden defines Saga: alte nordische, meist von den Kämpfen heldenhafter Bauerngeschlechter handelnde Erzählung in Prosa (an old Nordic story in prose mostly dealing with battles of heroic, primitive ethnic groups). It is this more restrictive meaning that the noun saga in English has tended to mean, and the English legend has the wider sense of Sage. Saga carries a Nordic and (potentially) an implicitly racial or racist overtone in German subsequent to the Nazis (whether palaeo- or neo-); Sage as legend could be any very old narrative from many centuries past. The stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, might have non-Nordic connotations of Saga, and might also be violent, sexist and elitist, but are definitely not “Nordic” in the sense of the Niebelungenlied or the stories in the poetic or prose Edda.
Barth wanted to range his sense of Sage less with ancient Nordic ancestry and more with the other legends in European and other literatures. He immediately defends his assertion from the charge that it attacks the substance of the biblical witness. “All that might be said is that according to the standards by which ‘historical’ truth is usually measured elsewhere or generally, this story is one that to some degree eludes any sure declaration that it happened as the narrative says.” (ibid.) Barth sees that saga (Sage) or legend “can only denote the more or less intrusive part of the story-teller or story-tellers in the story told.” This distinction will no longer suffice: what non-religious narrative history that presents the substance of narrative information does not also involve the more or less intrusive part of the historian as well as the historical source materials? The biblical narratives present the substance of biblical witness quite apart from any appeal to general historicity, a historicity which is by definition a judgement of probability of causation and consequence, since a historian can never enter a momentary event or the minds that participate in it when describing and judging it (or them). On the other hand, the biblical witness as saga (Sage) or legend is meant to be a narrative “and can thus be heard as a communication of history irrespective of the “historical” judgment.” (ibid.) Barth concludes, “the question of the particular historicity of the story at issue is at least not answered negatively.” Such particular historicity can be neither proven nor disproved but is narratively asserted.
Thus in the Christmas story heard every year, Quirinius was in fact a governor of Syria (an assertion which can be appraised by historians outside the biblical witness), but whether a baby was born in Bethlehem is beyond historical review, and not just because of that event’s obscurity. (That was Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, ca. 51 BCE—21 CE, for whom the birth year 703 ab urbe condita, or the Consulship of Marcellus and Sulpicius would have been better known designation.). As for the chorus of angels that spoke to shepherds: who knows? But the narrative presents the substance of biblical witness. The narrative is exempt from the general sense of history wie es eigentlich gewesen —what on earth could really (eigentlich) mean here?
Barth’s insight becomes later a cornerstone of postliberal or narrative theology, that the narrative of the Christian faith is regulative for the development of a coherent systematic theology. (Wikipedia, not a bad article)
Barth does not develop his concept of Sage further at this point of the Church Dogmatics, but turns instead to contrast Sage with Mythus, saga/legend with myth. George Hunsinger wrote a more lucid account than I could ever produce in his essay “Post-Critical Scriptural Interpretation: Rudolf Smend on Karl Barth”:
Saga or legend was a term Barth used over against “myth” and “history.” “Myths” were stories that embodied timeless truths, while “history” in this historicist sense excluded God on principle from its accounts. “Sagas” or legends, by contrast, were stories about actual, unrepeatable events in which God could be depicted (whether directly or indirectly) as the central acting subject. On the human side, sagas involved elements of theologically informed intuitions (Vorstellungen) as well as imaginative or poetic depictions (Darstellungen) of events that were in some sense beyond ordinary depiction. Although grounded in actual occurrences, sagas were not primarily reports, but witnesses to divine revelation. Barth used the term “saga,” for lack of a better term, in order to bring out the special literary genre of biblical stories about the world’s creation, the Virgin Birth, Christ’s resurrection, and other such ineffable occurrences. It represented a kind of critical realism that was unacceptable to historicists for its audacity and to literalists for its reticence.
In: Evangelical, Catholic and Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themes (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015), pages 106-125, quotation pages 120-121; reprinted from Thy Word Is Truth: Barth on Scripture (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2012)
In this chapter (I/1/8, part 2) Barth understands that the category of Sage is not an attack of the “substance” of the biblical witness (es braucht also die Substanz des biblischen Zeugnisses nicht notwendig anzugreifen). The category of myth is such an attack, however. Myth only pretends to be history. It “uses narrative form to expound what purports to be always and everywhere true. It “is an exposition of certain basic relationships of human existence, found in every time and place.” (I/1/327) Barth follows an essay by Eduard Thurneysen, (“Christus und die Kirche” in Zwischen den Zeiten, 1930, citation ibid.) Myth narrates as a fact what can happen in any time and place, is not unique but repeatable, a general possibility akin to a natural occurrence. What matters to Barth is the false corollary, “What happens in this way rests on nothing other than the assumption that the man to whom the revelation narrated in myth is imparted stands ultimately in an original and natural relation and connexion, hidden, of course, but present potentially at least everywhere, to the final ground of his existence, to his God.” (ibid.) A point supported by a well-known quotation from Goethe (well-known in Deutschgebiete, at least). Specific narrative “is stripped off again like a garment that has become too tight.” (I/1/328)
Barth concedes that “too be sure, one cannot prevent a historian from applying the category of myth to some events recorded in the Bible.” (ibid.) Such as historian has “as it were, read the Bible outside the Christian Church” and is not inquiring about or listening for revelation –all too natural for Barth’s present age of historicism. Myth does not just question but fundamentally denies history as such, and therefore the special historicity of biblical accounts.
Revelation is not a human creation, but is imparted to humans. Myth cannot do this, for its fundamental subject is human being and human consciousness. In relation to Scripture, the concept of myth rather than saga denies such specificity. “The revelations attested in the Bible do not purport to be manifestations of a universal or an idea which are special by nature but which can then be comfortably compared with the idea and understood and evaluated in their particularity.” (I/1/329)
Barth’s use of Sage (sagas or legends of a non-Nordic, non-heroic variety) opens a way in which the Church’s proclamation can be measured not by history but by the operating logic and procedure of dogmatic theology itself. It neither evades nor confirms common-sense “historicity” and it does not dissolve Biblical specificity, the then-and-there, into an everywhere-at-everytime potentiality such a myth. This is most important not only for the integrity of the Church’s proclamation, but for its relationship to history on one side, and to literature, on the other. Barth’s famous saying, that the preacher should read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, might be amended to: and a novel in the other, especially one by Dickens, Toni Morrison, Dostoyevsky, or Marilynne Robinson (among many others).
Updated February 2023 to correct certain editing errors.