given in the divine speaking and human hearing of this Word, “Jesus Christ!”—i.e., the event of revelation—is then, for Barth, the subject of theology. He understands theology to be first and last a discourse of faith upon the knowledge of faith. Consequently, the primary obligation for such a theology must be to listen to the “One Voice” of revelation that is heard and known only in faith, in distinction from the cacophony of voices comprising human history, however compelling or urgent they may appear to be.4
The One Voice of revelation addresses us with a divine Word that we cannot address to or speak by ourselves. We can only hear it, receiving it as it is given to faith. It is a voice, then, that stands over against all human voices, of both self and the neighbor; it addresses us in stark distinction from all voices of human self-understanding and self-definition. This is not to say that the Christian theologian does not also listen to the voices of human history, both past and present. It is, however, to say that the One Voice of revelation heard and known in faith decisively determines the meaning and significance of all the other voices competing for a hearing—voices that Christian theology is free to hear and engage under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and, indeed, is bound in obligation to hear and engage in Christian freedom. But more of that later.
For now, we simply note that it is no surprise, given the above, that Barth begins his Church Dogmatics with the doctrine of the Word of God. Systematically speaking, the Word of God is both the method and the content, the subject matter, of Christian theology. The epistemological questions of method—How do we know God? Where do we begin? On what ground? With what source?—are not separable from the soteriological question of content—What is it that God has said and done (and continues to say and do)? What is the news? And is it good?
With regard to method: Deus dixit; God speaks.
One is immediately struck by the two structural elements of the interpretive imperialism entailed in the Kierkegaardian rendering of the faith of Abraham. (1) Barth distinguishes the obligation to the One Voice of divine address from all other obligations to all other voices laying hold of us in the vast multiplicity of historical relations. (2) He irreversibly subjects the latter to the former with regard to ontological priority and interpretive authority for Christian faith and theology. Again, this is not to say that the latter are ignored, silenced or shut out, but that they are only heard and interpreted in the hearing of the former, whose particularity consists in its essential distinction from human voices speaking a word that is essentially our own. These structural elements constitute a general interpretive imperialism in relation to all human self-understanding and self-definition grounded apart from and independent of the One Voice of revelation. We can hear an echo of Kierkegaard’s language regarding Abraham in Barth’s assertion that “God’s Revelation is a ground which has no higher or deeper ground above or below it, but is an absolute ground in itself . . . from which there can be no possible appeal to a higher court.”5 As constituted by and in the event of revelation, faith would appear to be “the highest” in relation to the ethical.
With regard to content: what does God say when God speaks?
To say God speaks is to imply that God says something (as distinct from both nothing and everything), that God speaks a particular, determinate Word that is to be heard by a particular, determinate addressee. As we shall see, this is precisely why the ethical desire of the contemporary theological alternative represented by Ruether would prefer that God keep quiet; it proceeds upon the assumption of universal divine presence rather than the particularity of divine speech.6 For it is this implication (Deus dixit implies determinacy) that runs us directly into the substantive element of Abrahamic interpretive imperialism, the element of singular content. The singular Word of God spoken for and to the human creature7 (that is the source of faith and the authority for theology) is the divine-human reality of the one Jesus Christ, whose concrete humanness entails the Jewish flesh of the children of Abraham.8 And this is really the source of all the trouble. The One Voice of revelation that addresses a divine Word to us distinct from all human words that we can speak for and to ourselves, that addresses us from outside of all human self-understanding and self-definition, does so within history as a part of history. The outside (the primal eternal Word: “Jesus Christ!”) shows up on the inside (Jesus, from Nazareth, circa 1–33 AD). The One Voice, distinct from the cacophony of historical voices, addresses us from within that cacophony as part of that cacophony. Again, what a very strange and problematic way to proceed.
The Threefold Form of the “One Voice”
Doctrinally, Barth “seeks understanding” of the unaccountable mystery of God’s revelation by way of the Christological formula of Chalcedon.9 Jesus Christ is fully human and fully divine, two natures, united yet unmixed in one person. The two natures of the one Jesus Christ constitute not only the soteriological event of reconciliation between God and the human creature; it also constitutes both the event and means of communication between God and the human creature of the good news of that reconciliation (“I am with you”). God speaks God’s Word to the human ear and heart in the human vernacular, so to speak. God’s Word for and to us does not drop out of the sky and fall directly into our heads, transparent and in the raw.10 God’s Word comes to the creature in creaturely form, and is therefore a Word that is to be heard (and known, believed, confessed) by the creature in her or his creaturely form, as creature; it is spoken to and heard by the particular human addressee in her or his historical situation. The point is, after all, divine-human communion. The human partner is to remain “fully human” in this relation, the integrity of the creature respected, honored, and in tact, rather than breached, violated. There is no mixing of natures in some bizarre, cosmic work of divine alchemy. Weird science, no; unaccountable mystery of divine freedom, yes.
The outside shows up on the inside. “This ‘God with us’ has happened. It has happened in human history as a part of human history. Yet it has not happened as other parts of this history usually happen.”11 Teasing out the logic of this “Yet” is the key to understanding what Barth is up to with regard to the One Voice of revelation.
First, within human history as a part of human history. Revelation has happened primarily and once for all within history as the part of history known as the life, death, and resurrection of the person, Jesus Christ. But for Barth, revelation has happened, and continues to happen, in a secondary and dependent way, within history as two particular parts of history known as the Bible, the scriptural witness to that primary event, what the Church calls the Old and New Testaments, and secondly, the Church’s proclamation of that primary, once for all event on the basis of that scriptural witness. The primary event of revelation that is identical with the person of Jesus Christ, what Barth calls the Word of God revealed, “is the form that underlies the other two.” Both scripture and proclamation, therefore, “renounce any foundation apart from that which God has given once for all by speaking.”12 And this once for all speech, this decisive divine Word, is the divine-human person of Jesus Christ. However, Barth goes on to say, the primary event of revelation that has taken place in Jesus Christ “is the very one that never meets us anywhere in abstract form. We know it only indirectly, from Scripture and proclamation. The direct Word of God meets us only in this two-fold mediacy.”13
Second, yet not as other parts of human history. Yes, God’s Word always finds our ears and hearts in the form of a fully human word—particular, historical, concrete; spoken within the cacophony of history as part of the cacophony of history. Yet, it never ceases to be fully divine—God’s own Word spoken to the creature that the creature cannot speak for or to his or herself.14 In the free event of revelation, the creaturely, human phenomena of scripture and proclamation become truly and fully God’s Word, divine speech. Both “the human prophetic and apostolic word” and “the word of the modern [i.e., contemporary] preacher” constitute “a human word to which God has given Himself as object . . . a human word in which God’s own address to us is an event,” a human word that “is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that he speaks through it.”15 And as such, as God’s Word, it is a particular Word that determines and comprehends all other words; it is
