God’s Word is an act of aggression on his part, for it is grace that contradicts us in our self-will, and so confronts us with a decision in which we have to act against ourselves in self-renunciation and repentance. It is through the objection of God’s active revelation that we are able to distinguish it from our own subjectivities and know it to be really objective reality independent of us, real Word of God, as distinct from mere word of man.
In the second place, Barth became convinced that one of the great decisive issues in the history of the Church, and therefore of theology, was the relation of revelation to the Being and Person of God himself—Revelation, as Calvin had taught, is God speaking in Person. In other words, Revelation is God-in-his-revelation, God-in-his-Word. As Barth read his Church history he saw that this was the supreme importance of the struggle of the Church in the early centuries for a true and faithful Christology. What the Church insisted on guarding at all costs in the Nicene Christology is that God communicates himself in his revelation—not just something of himself, not just something about himself, but very God himself. That is the meaning of the Trinity, that in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit it is God in his Godness who confronts us. Hence in believing in his revelation we believe in God himself, and we believe in God by believing in his revelation.
The Reformation represents a new struggle within the Church for the same truth expressed in the Council of Nicaea, by its insistence that Jesus Christ is very God and very man, and that the Holy Spirit is the Lord, the Giver of Life. In other words, it is the truth that God’s gift is identical with himself the Giver. The point of battle was doubtless the conception of grace, and the objectivity of divine grace was clarified in a struggle over justification by grace alone, but in and throughout it all it was the same truth, that in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit God comes to us in Person and gives us himself. God himself is the content of his revelation, and himself the content of his saving grace—grace does not pass over into some subjective state of ours, or into some transferable quality of the soul, and revelation is not something that inheres in the Church, but God actively confronting us with his own Person, and revealing his own Being in that action.
Is it not precisely the same battle that needs to be fought all over again in the twentieth century, but one which combines the forms which the battle took both in the fourth and in the sixteenth century: God and no other is the content of his revelation, and God is himself really the content of it? When we speak of ‘Christ’ is it really God himself in his revelation we mean? And when we speak of the Holy Spirit, is it really God himself in his freedom to be present with us, or is it just our spirit that we mean? Is it not the Godness of God in his revelation that has been lost, and is that not the cause of the secularization of the Church and the secularization of modern man? Has revelation not somehow just become identified with change and improvement in the life of man? Has not knowledge of God come to mean something that goes on in the depths of the human soul? Hence is it not high time to take seriously again the ancient cause of the Church, renewed with such vigour at the Reformation, that God’s revelation is the revelation of God himself, of God-in-his-revelation, and that he is to be known only out of himself, for the God whom we know in revelation is God who remains Subject even when making himself the object of our knowledge? Hence Barth insists that theology is concerned with a knowledge of God that takes its rise from the sovereign act of his self-revelation and which is actualized only by way of recognition and acknowledgement of the truth of God as the one reality that is grounded in itself and therefore to be understood, derived, substantiated only out of itself. It is the knowledge of the one Truth of God who is of and through himself alone, and therefore a knowledge that is in accordance with the nature of that which is known; it is the knowledge of the ultimate Truth which by its very nature cannot be measured by any standard outside of it or higher than it, for there is no such standard—rather does every other truth take its origin from this Truth and point away to it as its goal.
In the third place, Barth insists that revelation is rational event, for in revelation God communicates to us his Word, and conveys to us his Truth, requiring of us a rational response in accordance with the rational nature of his Word, and a self-critical relation to his Truth as it calls us in question. Not only is revelation God’s Act and his Being in that Act, but Logos, the source and fountain of all rationality, and therefore knowledge of God in his revelation is rational in its own right, rational on the ground of the supreme and self-sufficient rationality of its object, God-in-his-Word. Thus in revelation theology is concerned with a depth in objective rationality that transcends that of any other kind of knowledge and of every other kind of science. Barth will have nothing to do, therefore, with some kind of faith-knowledge that is basically romantic and non-conceptual and which needs rationalizing through borrowed forms from ethics and philosophy. Knowledge of revelation is ab initio rational, for it is engagement in a divinely rational communication.
That does not mean that Revelation is the communication of pro-positional ideas or concepts already blocked out in propositional form, for what is communicated is God himself, God as Truth, Truth as the Being of God in his revelation. This is Truth not first in noetic form, but truth as ontic Reality, Truth in itself, and only on that ground is it noetic truth for us and in our knowing of it. This noetic truth which belongs to our theological statements is only truth as it derives from and rests in the ontic truth of God’s self-objectification for us, and self-giving to us in the revelation of himself—it is truth that has an ontological depth of objectivity in the very Being and Nature of God-in-his-Word. This is the aspect of Barth’s teaching which was so strongly affected by his studies of Anselm as well as Calvin.
If we look back at these three aspects of Barth’s understanding of the self-revelation of God through his Word, and ask what he means by theology, we must say that for him theology is a thinking from a centre in God, deriving from his active communication of himself in the form of personal Being and Truth, and pointing back to him as the goal of all true human thinking and knowing. While theology necessarily involves two poles of thought, God and man, for it is man who thinks and man who knows, it is not a thinking and knowing from a centre in man himself but from a centre in God. It is man’s objective thinking of a Truth that is independent of him and is yet communicated to him. Theology is correct and true thinking when its movement corresponds to the movement of the Truth itself, and is a thinking in accordance with it, a thinking that follows its activity, thinking that is obedient to its proper object, the Lord God.
We may say, then, that theo-logy is logos of God in a threefold sense of logos. Primarily we are concerned here with the Logos of God that is his own eternal Word and Son, the ground and source of all our human thinking and knowing. But this Logos has become flesh in Jesus Christ, for in him God has revealed and communicated himself to us within the objectivities of our existence in time and space, in creaturely and historical being, and hence in Jesus Christ God has objectified himself for us and given himself to our knowing and understanding. Yet Logos, in this second sense as the object of our knowing, remains the Lord, indissolubly Subject, who encounters us as Truth to be known only in so far as he encounters us as the very Being of God in Person; who meets us within the objectivities of our world which he has assumed for his self-revealing in Jesus Christ, in such a way that he remains the Lord, transcendent to all these objectivities, so objective that we can never master him in his objectivity and subdue him to some form of our own subjectivity in knowing or understanding him, but can only know him as we serve him and are obedient to the Truth. But theology includes a third sense of logos, in which it refers to our way of knowing and understanding the Truth of God in accordance with the way in which he has objectified himself for us in Jesus Christ. Thus theology is an activity of our reason in accordance with the nature of its proper object, God-in-his-Word, or God-in-his-revelation, in Jesus Christ. Theology is critical and positive activity in which we build up our knowledge of God from his Word which he gives as the object of our knowledge, and in which we test our knowing to make sure, as far as we can, that our noetic logos corresponds to the ontic logos in that Word. Thus theology operates with a mode of rationality that is required of us from the side of the object, and proceeds positively and critically in accordance with the way that the Word has taken in his self-communication to us.
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