methodological closeness of theology to empirical science is seen at a deeper level in the essentially scientific way in which it develops its method, for it does not bring to its task a method that it has already thought out or acquired, but elaborates a method only in its actualization of knowledge. Neither theological science nor empirical science knows a method in abstraction from the material content of its actual subject-matter. Thus the questions theology asks are not correlated with the subject but with the object. If it brings questions to its object, it is only in order that they may themselves be called in question by the object and be restated in accordance with the nature of the object. They are questions designed to let the object declare itself, and so are framed as questions that the object by its nature puts to the inquirer. In so far as they are thus correlated with the subject they are acts of self-criticism designed to clear away all artificiality and to open a way for seeing what is actually there and for learning what the objective reality has to disclose to us unhindered and undistorted, as far as possible, by any prior understanding on the part of the subject undertaking the inquiry. The questions that are put are only designed by the theologian or the scientist in order to let himself be told what he cannot tell himself and must genuinely learn. For theology this kind of inquiry is an act of repentant humility.
Of course, in the nature of the case, the kind of inquiry in which theology engages face to face with its object will differ from the kind of inquiry in which natural science engages face to face with its object, for the nature of object in each case demands that difference as a part of its scientific obedience. Natural science is concerned with creaturely objects, and, as a rule, with mute objects, so that although we speak here of letting the object disclose itself and yield to us knowledge of it, that is a way of insisting upon objectivity in investigation. But the kind of question the scientist has to put to these objects to make them ‘talk’ or yield their secrets are scientific experiments in which he compels them to reveal themselves. Controlled experiment is the kind of inquiry appropriate to inanimate creaturely objects, but the kind of inquiry appropriate to other human beings will pass beyond that to a kind which allows the other actively and willingly to reveal himself as one human person to another. The kind of inquiry that theology directs toward God must, scientifically, be appropriate to the nature of God before whom I am questioned before I begin to ask questions, whom I can know only as I am known by him, and knowledge of whom I can articulate only as he gives himself to me to be known. In other words, the kind of inquiry proper to theological science is prayer, inquiry which we address to God as the Truth in order that we may listen to what he tells us of himself, and may understand it only under his illumination of our minds. It is because the object of theological knowledge confronts us always as Subject, and indeed as absolute Subject, as the Lord God, that prayer is the scientifically correct mode of inquiry, for it is the mode of inquiry that corresponds to God’s nature as man’s Creator and Redeemer.
We may expound this relation between theology and exact science in another way. All scientific activity is one in which the reason acts strictly and precisely in accordance with the nature of its object, and so lets the object prescribe for it both the limits within which it is to be known and the mode of rationality that is to be adopted toward it. But for that reason it also lets the nature of the object determine the kind of demonstration appropriate to it. It will not insult the object by trying to subject it to some kind of demonstration that has been developed elsewhere in accordance with the nature of a different kind of object, nor by employing for its investigation external criteria dragged in from some other realm of knowledge. The kind of verification it must scientifically employ is the kind that derives from and is in accord with the actual way in which knowledge has arisen. That is to say, it never seeks to impose an arbitrarily constructed possibility upon the reality it is investigating, but will only argue from the reality to its possibility and within that movement subject its knowledge to critical examination.
This is precisely the way which Barth adopts in scientific dogmatics—as we can see very clearly in his brilliant interpretation of Anselm’s theological method, and in the way in which he has worked out his own epistemology in strict obedience to the nature of the concrete object of theological knowledge, God come to us in Jesus Christ, i.e. in such a way that in all his thinking he really allows God to be God, and refuses to think beyond him or above him. The procedure common to theological science and all other genuine science is one in which the mind of the knower acts in strict conformity to the nature of what is given, and refuses to take up a standing in regard to it prior to actual knowledge or in abstraction from actual knowledge. Scientific knowledge is one in which the reason does not proceed in the light of some inner dialectic of its own, but one that arises out of determination by the object known and derives from the rationality and necessity of that object. In theological knowledge the reason lets itself be determined by the nature of God in his revelation, and adopts a mode of rationality that corresponds with God’s objectifying of himself for man. That is epistemologically the meaning of faith—faith is not in the slightest degree any irrational leap, but a sober commitment to the nature of the given reality, a determination of the reason in accordance with the nature of the object, an orientation of the mind demanded of it in encounter with its unique and incomparable object that is and remains Subject, the Lord God. Faith means that to the self-giving, the self-revealing, and self-communication of God in his Truth there corresponds in man a receiving, an understanding and an appropriation of the Truth, but in such a way that the rationale and necessity of faith do not lie primarily in itself but primarily in the object of faith. Hence theological knowledge is not a scientific explication of the nature of faith, but in faith an explication of understanding of the independent reality known. Theological activity does not proceed in the light of the theologian’s faith, but in the light that comes from the side of that in which he has faith, the self-authenticating and self-revealing reality of God that according to its very nature can be known and understood and substantiated only out of itself.
Barth can speak here of three levels or realms of reality, the realm of actual knowledge, the realm of objectivity that lies behind it and determines it, and the ultimate and primary realm of the Truth of God itself. Scientific theological activity is concerned with all three and with all three together in a compulsive activity. The realm of knowledge is the realm of noetic experience and noetic necessity. Scientific knowledge is concerned with a knowledge that forces itself upon us and to which we cannot but yield in truthful and faithful rational activity, but knowledge is not established so long as we merely remain on the level of noetic necessity, for the necessity in that realm derives from an ontic necessity at its basis in the object. It is only when theological inquiry presses into that deeper level that scientific understanding arises—that is, in a movement of knowledge in which we do not master the object but in which it masters us, in which we reach an ontic rationality in the object of faith and establish as far as we can the necessary relation between that ontic rationality in the object and the noetic rationality in our understanding of it. It is in the critical clarification of that profound objective necessity that theological knowledge claims to be thoroughly and strictly scientific because controlled and determined from the side of what is objectively given.
But scientific theological activity cannot stop there, for the nature of its object will not allow it to do so—it is required to act in conformity to the ultimate objectivity of God that confronts it within the realm of the objectifiable where God has revealed himself to us within space and time, within our existence and history. It is this ultimate objectivity of the Lord God, in which he stands over against all our thinking in the unique manner of the Creator over against the thinking of the creature, that characterizes all genuine theological knowledge and gives it its ultimate differentiation from all other knowledge. Theology would not be scientific, if at this point it drew back, and refused to acknowledge the unique nature of its object, in some false attempt to content itself with an objectivity that is merely like the relative objectivity with which every natural science is concerned, the objectivity of what is given to it in the creaturely world alone. It is this relation of primary objectivity to secondary objectivity that gives theological knowledge its great depth, provides it with its supreme determination, and gives it its great freedom under the sovereign objectivity of the Object that remains the absolute Subject. It is just because theological knowledge is confronted with the Lord God who lays his
