3. The Revealed Word of God
What is the relationship between the forms of the Word of God: proclamation, Scripture, and revelation? “The Bible is the concrete means by which the Church recollects God’s past revelation, is called to expectation of His future revelation, and is thus summoned and guided to proclamation and empowered for it.” (I/1/111) The relation of these three forms is irregularly triangular: neither of them is in itself either God’s past revelation (the Bible) or the expected future revelation (proclamation). The promise in proclamation rests upon the attestation of past revelation in the Bible: this attestation is its “decisive relation of the Church to revelation.” (ibid.) As God’s Word it “bears witness to God’s past revelation.” (ibid.)
Here witnessing “means pointing in a specific direction beyond the self and on to another. Witnessing is thus service to this other in which the witness vouches for the truth of the other, the service which consists in referring to this other.” (ibid.) Witnessing (bezeugen or Bezeugung) is the service of “this other,” the distinctive service of the Prophet and the Apostle. The canon or staff founded upon those Prophets and Apostles “is moved by a living stretched-out hand, just as the water was moved in the Pool of Bethesda .” (ibid.) The biblical witnesses do not speak and write “for their own sakes, nor for the sake of their deepest inner possession or need; they speak and write, as ordered, about that other.” (I/1/122). It is not a question of self-assertion, or of an immanent teleology, but by their own agency –(here) in a particular sense, “but through themselves in such a way that what makes man a witness is solely and exclusively that other, the thing attested.” (ibid.) (Barth thus approaches the famous problem of double agency, but properly defers further expansion until a later time.)
The Biblical witness thus claims no authority for itself: its witness “witness amounts to letting that other itself be its own authority.” (ibid.) In an excursus Barth cited specifically the figure of St. John the Baptist in Matthias’ Grunewald’s Crucifixion scene, “especially his prodigious index finger. Could anyone point away from himself more impressively and completely (illum oportet crescere me autem minui) (referring to the Latin for John 3:30)” (I/1/112) The biblical word comes into play as a word of witness, “when and where John’s finger does not point in vain but really indicates, when and where we are enabled by means of his word to see and hear what he saw and heard. Thus in the event of God’s Word revelation and the Bible are indeed one, and literally so.” (I/1/113) Here Barth’s personalism, his sense of the Holy as Event, as an encounter unique in kind and as free comes clear in a manner which shapes every subsequent paragraph of the Church Dogmatics.
But this unity (supposing that revelation and Bible are one in fact word-for-word) is not always just one thing (i.e. a formal property), but “their union is really an event.” (ibid.) For this event there is really no analogy, “in revelation our concern is with the coming Jesus Christ and finally, when the time was fulfilled, the Jesus Christ who has come. Literally, and this time really directly, we are thus concerned with God’s own Word spoken by God Himself.” (ibid.) But in Scripture we see “human attempts to repeat and reproduce this Word of God in human words and thoughts and in specific human situations.” (ibid.) “On the one hand Deus dixit, on the other Paulus dixit. These are two different things.”(ibid.) But in the event they become “one and the same thing in the event of the Word of God, we must maintain that it is by no means self-evident or intrinsically one that revelation should be understood primarily as the superior principle and the Bible primarily as the subordinate principle.”(I/1/113-114).
“Revelation engenders the Scripture which attests it.” (1/1/115) This is irritatingly circular to logicians, but safeguards the freedom and grace of God whose Word becomes manifest in Scripture and Proclamation in the event of Jesus Christ. Therefore, as the record “of a unique hearing of a unique call and a unique obedience to a unique command . . . it could become the Canon, and again and again it can become the “living” Canon, the publisher of revelation” (ibid.) “God was with us, with us His enemies, with us who were visited and smitten by His wrath. God was with us in all the reality and fulness with which He does what He does.” (ibid.) Thus in the event, “the biblical witnesses [are] remarkable figures like John who cannot be brought under any morphology of genius.” (ibid.) God was with us, but not as fragments of human history usually happen, without completeness, “as self-moved being in the stream of becoming. It has happened as completed event, fulfilled time, in the sea of the incomplete and changeable and self-changing..” (I/1/116).
Therefore we do not really understand the Bible from our own standpoint: “the Bible gives itself to be understood by us, so that we come to hear the Bible as God’s Word.” (ibid.). Any Christian who has had the experience of suddenly intuiting what a previously opaque passage of Scripture might really mean knows this truth as a conviction –not a logical “addition to content” but an un-looked-for new point of view. This is the freedom of God’s grace in revelation, “the event in which the free God causes His free grace to rule and work.” (I/1/117) (See also my comment about Gadamer, below.)
In conclusion, “All revelation, then, must be thought of as revealing, i.e., as conditioned by the act of revelation.” (I/1/119) “Revelation in fact does not differ from the person of Jesus Christ nor from the reconciliation accomplished in Him.” (ibid.)
In short, whereas the Christ of the Second Coming is none other than He that came, “‘God with us’ becomes actual for us hic et nunc as the promise received and grasped in faith because it is illic et tunc a divine act. It is thus that which is true in and for itself” (I/1/120). The Word of God becomes true for us “as recollection and also as promise, as recollection of Christ come in the flesh and as hope of Christ coming again in glory. ” (I/1/120) Jesus Christ speaks for Himself in Scripture, needs no witness save His Holy Spirit, and is glad of the faith of His own in the promise received and grasped. This origin of the Word of God is independent, unsurpassable, and “materially” first as the form of the Word of God.
By way of commentary, this sub-section certainly reminds me of the frustrating circularity which I first experienced in Barth, and which definitely put me off Barth at that time. In the decades since I have come to see that Barth’s deep and thorough-going concern to safeguard the freedom of God’s grace requires him to posit a circular relationship between the forms of the Word of God as the logically prior (if not materially original) foundation by which he can establish the independence of ecclesiastical dogmatics from human philosophy –as laudable as human philosophy may be.
Barth must assert the unsurpassability and independence of the Word of God so that humans do not wind up controlling that Word, but are instead brought to listen to it in faith. This circularity is both a claim and a corrective of the immanent philosophies both of liberal Protestantism and scholastic Roman Catholic dogmatics. Barth’s line of thinking about Scripture has a certain general similarity with Gadamer’s understanding of Spiel (play), and of the conditioning and conditioned role played by tradition, expressed most fully in his Truth and Method (1960 –but decades in the making). Gadamer the philosopher has clearly differing aims from Barth the dogmatic theologian, yet it is no wonder that those who read Barth sometimes find in Gadamer a consonant approach (with a differing subject matter). Barth can also be subject to criticism similar to Habermas’ criticism of Gadamer: that Barth may be too reliant upon a tradition which –in a post-holocaust world– needs to be questioned radically.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, Dec. 2019