Reading Notes:

Karl Barth, ‘Revelation’

in Revelation, ed. John Baillie (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1937).

Summary - According to Barth, God cannot be known or discovered through human attempts at discovering Him - whether those be through observing the world and making inferences about the possibility or probability of God’s existence, or through human reason’s reflecting on the concept of ‘God’ as a Perfect Being, etc. The result of these natural theologies is a self-created god in our own image, an idol. Instead, proper theology must solely begin from the actuality of the place where God has spoken, where He has revealed Himself - in Jesus Christ, God’s own Self encountering of human being in a particular life lived and death died in a specific time and place.

Reading:

Karl Barth

‘Revelation’

Notes for Reading:

Read the text briefly through once before hand, making notes on the gist of Barth’s argument, and then return its details with the help of the reading notes.

p. 41

• ‘the Christian apprehension of revelation’ - notice that Barth is not speaking of attempting to discover God, or prove God’s existence, etc., from the position of being a neutral position. Rather he starts from the actuality of revelation as it has already been given and received.

• ‘places himself ... within a quite definite sphere, in which a well defined discipline holds good’ - knowing God can only be done within a definite place where knowledge can be obtained and good scientia may be practised.

p. 42

• ‘The Christian apprehension of revelation is the response of man to ...’ - this whole sentence could serve as a summary of Barth’s theological method. To know is to respond, since only in that response does one personally apprehend who one is following.

• ‘the Word of God whose name is Jesus Christ’ - Barth is clear that primarily God’s Word, the very speech of the being of God himself, is a Person (Jesus Christ), not an abstract principle or a text.

• ‘It is the Word of God who creates the Christian apprehension of revelation’ - humanity does not discover God, or reason towards God, but rather is revealed to.

p. 43

• ‘Revelation need not first be brought in from any quarter, or furnished with proof’ - Barth reiterates the previous point.

• ‘revelation is from the very first already known and already possessed’ - Barth beings only from the actuality of revelation and not from questions of its possibility.

• ‘Nor is the Christian apprehension subject to any general truths about God or man...’ - revelation does not reveal general propositions, or general principles that might be know from elsewhere.

p. 44

• ‘to bring himself to an attitude of attention, of awe, of trust, of obedience to this name’ - theology is about much more than the articulation of the merely cognitive perception of the Christian apprehension of revelation. Rather, it involves the whole person in trusting the One who is the Revealer, the Revealed, and the Revealing.

• ‘revelation ... still takes place’ - revelation is not a once for all that has been handed down and recorded from some past time, but a living event.

p. 45

• ‘event’ - event-language, characterising history and actions, is to be contrasted with language depicting static and never changing states of affairs.

• ‘in Jesus Christ ... alone, there enters upon the stage of human life that which is really new, that which is hitherto unknown, because veiled and hidden’ - the ‘new’ refers to the fact that the coming of Jesus Christ was an eschatological event: i.e., God’s inbreaking into the affairs of the world with something that had not been previously known, understood, etc. This could not have been predicted in advance.

• ‘recollection ... of the Ideas, in the Platonic sense’ - Plato believed that everything in the phenomenal world is patterned, in varying degrees of perfection, on eternal Ideas or Forms. The act of ‘recollection’ suggests that these eternal and unchanging Ideas were once known and subsequently forgotten, but could still, through philosophical training, be relearned and contemplated.

p. 46

• ‘having taken place once for all’ - the event of the incarnation is a unique event with no need for repetition.

• ‘it speaks for itself’ - only by attentively standing in the place of hearing the revelation can we know the revelation and the God who is revealed.

• ‘whether by revelation they do not at the best mean ... the highest manifestation of an idea, of a general potentiality’ - Barth’s attitude to religion is that it fails to encounter and hear the Word of God speaking. Instead, following the critique of religion by Ludwig Feuerbach, Barth believes that religion is the projection of general (or even some specific) human traits, values, nature onto an idol that is thereby created.

p. 47

• ‘Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of divine prophecy’ - God had prepared his elect people Israel by revealing himself to them, and promising them his ‘Christ’.

• ‘He is not, however, the fulfilment of human yearnings, of human demands and human speculations’ - Barth is insistent on the fact that there is nothing about human beings, or even the world in general, that could have forced God to reveal himself in his Son, by which humanity could then lay claim to and possess as if revelation was in their power to manipulate, control or demand.

• ‘no point from which we can survey Him’ - one of Barth’s main complaints about the method of ‘natural theology’ is that it does not stand in the appropriate place in which to know God (and even know of his existence). Instead it attempts to stand in a neutral place from which to observe and deliberate and discover God. But such a place is an illusion and these attempts are "symptoms of the fact that the reality and the potentiality of His person are both still hidden from us."

• ‘how could we desire to exalt ourselves above Him in this fashion?’ - if God’s revelation is the "verification of the a priori wit of man" then humanity could control the event: revelation would be the fulfilment of something in human being, whatever that something may be. This idea is the sin of pride, exalting ourselves above God. But if we have heard revelation then such a self-exaltation is impossible.

• ‘this very fact betrays that even the reality of His existence is unknown to us...’ - the event of revelation tells us that we did not know God, and even his existence, prior to the event since the event brings something new to us. "[O]nly the man who knows about Jesus Christ knows anything at all about revelation" (p. 47).

p. 48

• ‘we shall make no attempt to master Him’ - revelation indicates that it is we who are mastered by God, discovered by him, etc.

• ‘to which analogies can be drawn’ - a reference to natural theology’s analogia entis, the procedure of identifying the existence and nature of God on the basis of drawing analogies with things that we know about the world and ourselves.

p. 49

First full paragraph - Barth rehearses his argument that revelation/Jesus Christ cannot be known or discovered through human thinking about general principles (about the world or human being, logic, etc.).

• ‘Jesus Christ as the eternal Word who was made flesh’ - an allusion to the Johannine imagery depicting the person of Jesus as God’s Word incarnate.

• ‘revelation is grace for sinners’ - human beings are sinners. They have turned away from God and live in disobedience to him and do not fulfil the purpose of their humanity as created by God. Revelation, as something new, comes from God’s grace - i.e., from God’s free goodness and mercy - "grace for sinners means an especial, free, unmerited and unearned act of divine turning towards, and condescension to, man." There is nothing about human beings that could have deserved or rightly demanded revelation.

p. 50

• ‘The grace of God made manifest in Jesus Christ necessarily brings us into Judgment’ - revelation shows us up for what we are - disobedient creatures who do not know or follow God.

• ‘the same eternal Word of God ... is to be perceived in creation as the first work of God’ - Barth here indicates the lines that he will pursue in his doctrine of election in Church Dogmatics II.2. The incarnation was not some after thought or rescue plan subsequently hatched after human beings fell. Rather it was conceived as the ground for creation - that the world was created for the purpose of the incarnation.

p. 52

• ‘the one and only way which was adopted by God to reveal Himself in Jesus Christ’ - God does not reveal himself in other things other than the way he has chosen.

p. 53

• ‘He is the grace of God made manifest to us’ - as the incarnate Word, as God’s Self, Jesus Christ is grace, the free gift of God to sinful human beings.

p. 54

• ‘We acknowledge God’s true and sole revelation just in the fact that we acknowledge the true manhood of Jesus Christ’ - God is known only through this event of God’s condescension - his Word’s incarnation in Jesus Christ, since Jesus Christ is God’s revelation, God’s very Self in flesh. If Christ is a mere man then what is revealed is not God.

• ‘God’s grace means the presence and the act of God Himself’ - grace is not some abstract gift, or variety of gifts, from God, but rather God’s very presence in his revelation.

p. 55

• ‘we confess that this Man was...’ - Barth alludes to the Apostles’ Creed, the explication of which is vital in a properly operating theology.

• ‘in His existence He is the reconciliation’ - if revelation shows that humanity is sinful and distant from God it also indicates that in Jesus Christ God has recreated and established communion "between man and God". Just as there is only one way to know God there is only one way of communing with this God, given in the very event of knowing this God. Christ, and he alone, by virtue of being both God and man, is "the bridging of the gulf that has opened here" through humanity’s sin (p. 56).

p. 56

• ‘in Jesus Christ God Himself steps into the place of sinful man’ - reconciliation takes place in Christ because God incarnate has taken the place of human beings. Barth’s theology of reconciliation stresses the vicarious nature of Christ’s existence: that he does what we did not do - live and die as a human being perfectly obedient to God - and in so doing has created a new obedient humanity for our sakes.

• ‘His bowing to the judgment of God’ - in the context of Barth’s theology this is not to be understood as implying a simple form of penal substitution in which Jesus was punished for our sins (so that we would not have to be), and that we are justified because he took that punishment instead of us. Rather, the judgment here referred to is the judgment/declaration that human beings are created to be obedient to God, but have become sinful and have fallen away from God.

• ‘expiation’ - echoing Pauline imagery of sacrifice, the making atonement or cleansing from sin.

p. 57

• ‘And sinful man is translated to the place of God’ - Barth’s theology of reconciliation echoes aspects of John Calvin’s theology of the ‘wonderful exchange’ in the eucharist, learned from the soteriology of several of the Church Fathers (e.g., Irenaeus and Athanasius): that Christ became what we are so that we might become what he is. In his resurrection and ascension, Christ has presented this new obedient, reconciled and recreated human being to God. In Christ, humanity "has [been] accepted and raised up to unity with Himself." Barth actually mentions the word "exchange" (p. 58).

p. 59

• ‘Faith’ - faith is much more than mere intellectual assent to, and cognition of, the propositions about revelation and reconciliation. It "is the reference of all our living, thinking, willing and feeling to the existence of Jesus Christ": i.e., the conversion of the whole person.

• ‘faith is the ultimate repose, certainty, serenity and hope, which is true and enduring because it is not grounded upon any state, knowledge or action of our own...’ - humanly founded faith and hopes are fragile and relative because they are based on things that are contingent and ever changing. But faith and hope in Christ is based on the divine revelation, and is therefore imbued with a certainty.

p. 60

• ‘Faith ... is a free act of human choice and decision’ - faith in God is not imposed on anyone from outside of oneself. It is an internal disposition concerning one’s own heart, will and understanding.

• ‘apprehend myself only as one who, before he makes his choice, is chosen, and as one upon whom ... a decision has descended’ - our choosing of God is not something achieved or merited by human beings, as if God is within our reach and control. Rather, our choice is situated in the fact that we have already been created, chosen, and reconciled by God himself.

p. 61

• ‘I am thankful for it’ - the proper human response to God’s call to us in revelation is thankfulness for his grace, as opposed to a presumptuous feeling that we achieved knowledge of and reconciliation with God by ourselves .

• ‘miracle’ - refers to the eschatological significance of revelation as something new to us - i.e., that it is not within creaturely capabilities to achieve.

• ‘the apprehension is itself revelation, is itself the pouring out of the Holy Ghost’ - revelation (i.e., God’s Self in Jesus Christ) comes to us as a new event in our present in the Holy Spirit. Barth’s theology of revelation is necessarily Trinitarian in character.

p. 62

• ‘through the medium of His manhood’ - God reveals himself in and through the creaturely realm, in and through the humanity of Jesus Christ. We do not know directly of God’s naked deity, only of indirectly of God’s Self through this medium. This is the "token" of revelation. "[W]ithout this token, the revelation would not be visible and audible to men. Without this token there would be no communication to men, and consequently no revelation" (p. 63).

p. 64

• ‘tokens of revelation’ - God in Christ has instituted certain things, "tokens", to witness to his revelation in Jesus Christ. These things are not tokens of revelation because of any innate power but rather because they have been chosen to operate as such. Only through these can revelation be known.

• ‘Christ is their prototype’ - Christ’s humanity is the primary and absolute token of revelation, of God’s eternal Word that is God himself. All other tokens are patterned on his humanity, and indeed point to him.

p. 65

• ‘the miraculous token of the Empty Tomb’ - Barth believed both in the Virgin Birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Both are indications of Jesus’ identity and significance. The former witnesses to God’s miraculous condescension to humanity, while the latter speaks of "the reality of this new divine beginning" (p. 66).

p. 66

• ‘Unbelief is possible’ - the tokens can be missed for what they are, or mistaken for something else.

p. 67

• ‘Holy Scripture is not the revelation. And yet ... is the revelation... ’ - by this paradox Barth maintains that the text of scripture cannot be equated with revelation (since revelation is the person of God in Christ), but its witness to Christ can be used by Christ to reveal himself. The place of scripture as a witness to revelation is vital: "there has never yet been a faith in the revelation which has passed by this token, a faith which was not rather awakened, nourished and controlled precisely through the instrumentality of this token" (p. 68).

p. 69

• ‘Neither preaching nor sacrament can be dispensed with’ - Barth followers the Swiss Reformers in his emphasis on the scriptures, preaching and sacraments.

• ‘the Church’ - the ecclesia, as the congregation of the reconciled, is the place where the Word may be heard speaking through the ministry of preaching and sacraments. The Church is responsible for passing on the witness and it proclamation "pure and unsullied" (p. 70). This congregation is the place where faith is awakened. Barth later cites the extra ecclesiam nulla salus (p. 74).

p. 70

• ‘As a concluding point we come to the individual Christian’s experience and exhibition of faith’ - Barth consciously reverses the order of importance of individual and Church, with its consequent focus on the individual’s faith, so prominent in modern Pietism. The individual’s location is clearly within the Church.

p. 74

• ‘Revelation ... is not merely a matter of communication of divine truth about the relation between God and man’ - Barth reiterates his point that revelation is God’s Self in Christ through the Spirit, something which then claims humanity in her totality of being (the event of reconciliation), and as such it includes within it the communication of truth.

p. 75

• ‘service’ - the proper human work cannot add anything to the accomplished revelation and reconciliation. It merely, but necessarily, has its proper place as a boundless gratitude for the divine grace, faith in it, and the service within the limit of one’s human capacity.

p. 76

• ‘restoring the real order’ - revelation and reconciliation do not capriciously shatter human nature by demanding something absurd. It rather restores the order that the world was created for.

p. 77

• ‘sovereignty of God’, ‘divine freedom’ - themes central to Barth’s understanding of God, and God’s dealings with the world - it is God’s world, created freely and given the grace of revelation and reconciliation out of grace - i.e., not because God needed to or because the something in or about the world necessitated and deserved it.

p. 78

• ‘The Christian will never think or speak of the Church as if God had transferred His truth and righteousness to her in general, or more particularly to her officials, to be controlled by them’ - Barth’s concern for the sovereignty of God and the person of grace leads him to continually emphasise the fact that God and grace remain free and can never be possessed, even by the Church. This point is often directed by Barth against the theology of authority in the Roman Catholic Church.

• ‘insignificance and frailty of all Christian experience and ... work’ - the Church and Christians remain sinful in this world.

p. 79

• ‘the restoration of order in the relations between God and man has already taken place and is already manifest in the essence of revelation’ - reconciliation is accomplished as actual in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ.

p. 80

• ‘Remembering and drawing comfort from the fulfilment which has taken place in Jesus Christ ... we await the fulfilment of our time also’ - memory of that fulfilment in Christ is our basis and starting-point as we await the eschatological consummation, the world’s fulfilment in the unveiling of its being in Christ.

• ‘Theology’ - theology is "an ecclesiastical science" (Wissenschaft): i.e., it uses the methods and tools appropriate to its task - analogous to the procedures of the natural sciences - and it is located in the proper context of the Church. Its function is to critically test the Church’s proclamation through the hearing of the Word of God.

• ‘no systematic correlation’ - Barth associates systematisation with the developing of principles that are static and closed. Theology, on the contrary, as a human discipline (and therefore pervaded by sin) is open and constantly revisable.

p. 81

• ‘the work of revelation, in its full operation upon man and his world, is a future work’ - refers to the future unveiling even though we have already experienced the fulfilment somewhat through being encountered by Christ.

• ‘For our time is the time between the Ascension and the Return of Jesus Christ’ - Barth continually reminds one of the eschatological nature of our present time.