over us that theological thinking can be carried out only in the strictest discipline, in stringent self-criticism and in utter obedience to the object. But because it is the Lord God who confronts us in theological knowledge, he confronts us necessarily as he who is greater than we can conceive, who transcends all our formulations of him, but who nevertheless gives himself to us as the object of our knowledge. Hence, even if our knowing of him is not adequate to his nature, it is not for that reason false, for he has come to us, adapted himself to us, and given himself to us to be known as reality within the actualities of our own being and existence, in Jesus Christ.
This means that the central and pivotal point of all genuine theological knowledge is to be found in Christology, in Jesus Christ in whom God and Man are one Person, in whom the primary objectivity of God meets us within the secondary objectivities of the given. A scientific theology will therefore operate on a Christological basis, for Christology will have critical significance for its inquiry into the understanding of the Truth of God at every point. Because God has once for all revealed himself in Jesus Christ, not in some merely transient fashion, which God leaves behind, and which man then, too, may eventually leave behind, but in such a way that God has for ever bound himself to our humanity in Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ bound us in a relation to him that is creative as well as redeeming. If God in Jesus Christ not only gives us to know something of himself, but gives us himself, if in Jesus Christ we are encountered not only by the Act of God but by the very Being of God in the Act, then we can never think of going behind the back of Jesus Christ in order to know God for that would be equivalent to trying to think beyond and above God himself, and to making ourselves as God. It is Christological thinking that teaches us to let God be God: to know God strictly and only in accordance with the steps he has taken to reveal himself to us, and therefore to test our knowledge of God in accordance with the steps in which knowledge of him has actually arisen and actually arises for us.
Now, if scientific theological knowledge refuses to operate merely within the noetic necessity of our thinking and speaking, but presses into the ontic necessity at the basis of those statements, that is into the inner rationality of the object itself, then it will be concerned to elucidate not only the basic noetic forms of rational theological thinking but the basic ontic forms through which everything is determined, for only in so doing can it establish the necessary relation between its thought and the object of its thought in a proper scientific manner. Hence theological thinking must probe into the inner basic forms and norms of its object as they are revealed in the material content of its thought. In other words, it will not employ any criteria in the testing and establishing of its knowledge in abstraction from its actual content, and will not elaborate any epistemology in abstraction from the full substance of theological knowledge—rather will a correct epistemology emerge, and a proper theological method develop, in the actual process of seeking full understanding of the object of faith and constructing a dogmatics in utter obedience to its object. Strictly speaking, it is only at the end of the work of dogmatics that it will be possible to expound properly an adequate epistemology. And yet, just because theological knowledge is confronted with the primary and ultimate objectivity of God, and must in accordance with its nature and freedom ‘break’ its theological formulations in recognition of their inadequacy and use them in all their noetic and ontic truthfulness in pointing beyond themselves to the one Truth of God, theological knowledge can never come to an end, but is by its very nature, at least for mortals on earth and pilgrims in history, a perpetual inquiry and a perpetual prayer that take place in the interval between the inception of faith and final vision. There will be no possibility therefore of abstracting from the substance of theology some final theological method which can then be wielded magisterially to subdue all doctrines to some rigid pattern, and there will be no possibility of reaching final solutions to theological problems—true prayer to the living God is unceasing, and true theological inquiry is unceasing worship and adoration. But this would, Barth insists, be prayer and worship without faith in the hearing of prayer and without trust in the grace and truth of God if theological thinking in the prosecution of its inquiry were not entirely certain of its object, and therefore ready to pursue its task in reliance upon the creative and normative activity of the object of its knowledge.
Theological certainty is pivoted upon the object, never pivoted upon the subject of the knower but because it looks for justification not at its own hands, nor on the ground of its own activity, but solely at the hands of God and solely on the grounds of his grace, it will be no less but even more ready to venture forth at its own level with absolute confidence and in its unconditional demands for precise doctrinal formulation. Thus when theological activity engages in self-critical questioning and in acknowledgement of the inadequacy of its own formulations of the Truth, that is not because it engages in doubt or because it is sceptical of its function, but on the contrary because its absolute certainty reposing upon the object requires of it humility and repentance. It is this certainty of the object that lets the theologian know that for all the questionableness and inadequacy of his own human employment of human forms of thought and speech, his theological understanding is not for that reason false, for the truth of his thinking stands or falls with its relation to the object, and derives not from the truth of itself but from the truth in the object towards which it points. By claiming truth in itself, it would become false, for it would arrogate to itself an ontic necessity and truth that belong only to the object, and so would betray its theological thinking into some form of ideological interpretation or speculation, or confound its own objective statements with the independent objectivity of the Truth of God. The truth of theological statements is linked with the fact that considered in themselves they have no truth of their own, but bear witness to the one Truth of God which is their sole justification and substantiation.
When we ask what the contribution of Karl Barth is, through a constructive dogmatics built up in this scientific manner, we may answer by drawing parallels between his work and that of Albert Einstein and Nils Bohr in the realm of pure natural science. If Einstein’s immense contribution lies in the fact that he has penetrated down into the deep rationality of the universe of nature and laid bare its fundamental simplicities in a logical economy that is profoundly illuminating for the whole world of natural science and immensely fertile in the solving of many of its most difficult problems, and if in doing that Einstein’s thinking involves the establishing of the age-old inquiry of science more securely on its proper axis in spite of the revolutionary effects of his theory of relativity, then mutatis mutandis, that, it can be said, is also the contribution of Karl Barth in the realm of theological science. For on the one hand he has penetrated into the deep objective rationality of theological knowledge and laid bare its basic simplicities which are proving immensely fertile throughout the whole realm of theological inquiry, and at the same time has through that attainment of a fundamental, theological economy established the catholic faith of the whole Church on a foundation that cuts across the theologies of East and West, Roman and Evangelical thinking, and presses in the most startling way towards a unitary understanding of the historic faith of the Christian Church in its one Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
If the contribution of Nils Bohr in the realm of physics can be said to lie in the construction of an interpretation of nuclear activity that calls for a logical reconstruction of classical physics and mechanics, and so opens up in an astonishingly new way the relation of logic to being or rather of being to logic, so it must be said that the work of Karl Barth calls for a radical reconstruction both of Mediaeval and Neo-Protestant thought-forms, for only in breaking through these historic ways of thinking can we carry out the scientific task of theology in seeking to let our minds be utterly obedient and faithful to what is revealed from the side of the objectively given. Here there opens up a way of articulating theology within the essentially a posteriori and dynamic mode of modern thinking that is yet basically realist, in the sense that it is wholly devoted to its object, and will have nothing to do with the elaboration either of an existentialist ideology or an independent ontology. It will take generations to measure the significance of Barth’s Herculean efforts in positive theology, but it is already clear that the whole of future theological thinking will have to reckon with what he has laid bare in the inner structure of catholic and evangelical doctrine, and with the central and dominant significance for all theological thinking he has uncovered in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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