God be God, and therefore ready to let knowledge of God be grounded in God’s own self-revelation, and the establishment of the truth of that knowledge be God’s act and not man’s. In other words, the question which theology must pose over against idealism is the question directed from justification by the grace of God alone to every Pelagian or semi-Pelagian attempt on the part of the human reason to be able to acquire knowledge of God or at least to be able to test and establish the truth of revelation on its own ground. If God is really God, then knowledge of him must be by way of humble obedience, by way of listening to him and serving his Word, and yielding our minds to the direction of his Truth. God is God, and not our idea of God, and therefore all our ideas of him have to be called in question by the very critical question from which idealist thinking takes its rise. And yet here, theology must beware lest it is after all engaging not in theological thinking, but in some form of philosophical idealism itself, for the critical question theology directs does not arise out of any independent rational movement of its own, but is forced upon it by the object of its knowledge, and by the nature of the objectivity of the object, the nature of God who gives himself to us in sheer grace and remains sovereignly free in his transcendent Lordship over all our thoughts of him and over all our formulations of the understanding he gives us of himself in his Word.
The problems posed by philosophical realism and idealism must be taken seriously by theology, but they are questions that theology must learn to raise in its own way and in the closest relation to its own proper object. But the discussion with philosophy shows theology that it must take seriously both poles of its thinking, truth and actuality, thought and being, the knowing subject and the object known. Theology learns that there can be a one-sided realist theology which is tempted to confound God with nature, and there can be a one-sided idealist theology which is tempted to confound God with the reason. Inevitably, therefore, the dialectic between these two counter-movements will throw up the correctives from either side which the other side needs. In such a situation it is possible that a theology may be more realist in orientation and still be theology and another may be more idealist in orientation and still be theology—rather than some species of philosophy or ideology.
But a good theology cannot rest content with that sort of dialectic; rather has it to think more concretely out of the depths of its own concern, and engage in a more material mode of thinking of the tensions between the knowing subject and its given object that is governed by the nature of its subject-matter. Theology just because it is theology must learn to distinguish its dialectic from all philosophical forms of the dialectic between subject and object. All philosophy worthy of the name seeks in some way to reach a unitary understanding of the universe, and so to transcend the dialectic between realism and idealism. But whether it is realistically or idealistically slanted, whether it erects a synthesis from the side of being or from the side of the reason, it is fundamentally a movement from man toward God, and claims in the last analysis to be able to say an ultimate word or at least to aim at an ultimate word that transcends the antitheses and contradictions revealed within human existence. But theology as a thinking that takes its rise from a centre in God and not from a centre in man, comes from the very point (from God) which philosophy hopes to reach. There is thus an inescapable tension between the essential intention of theological thought and the essential intention of philosophical thought, for they move in opposite directions.
In so far as philosophy is engaged in unitary or synthetic thinking theology has no quarrel with it, but can only learn from it and cooperate with it. But if philosophy insists on going further, in identifying its synthesis with God, in claiming the conclusion of its argument to be the ultimate reality, in confounding its own word projected above the tensions of human existence with the Word of God, that is, in so far as philosophy turns itself into a theosophy, then theology cannot but do battle with it. Theology that is interpretation of the Word of God spoken to human existence cannot allow the place and authority of that Word to be usurped by a word of man that derives from his own reflection upon the problems of human existence. But may not the counter-questions theology poses to every philosophy that is tempted to become a theosophy help to keep philosophy pure, help it to become self-critical, and so to be genuine philosophy that is aware of the limits of human thinking, and will not ascribe to itself the ability to transcend itself?
Theology’s answer to the problems posed by philosophy is not only one derived from the essential form of theo-logical thinking as distinct from every ideo-logical thinking, but one that must be derived from the basic content of theological knowledge and one that reposes upon the actuality and truth of its own object, God in his revelation. In other words, the answer that theology must give is one that reposes upon God’s decision to give himself to man as the object of his knowledge and upon the content of that gift, for they establish the possibility and determine the reality of all theological thinking. Looked at from one aspect this is the epistemological significance of election—which stands for the fact that theology does not move in a direction of its own choosing, but only in the way God has chosen for it, and that therefore it has its necessity outside of itself, in God. This means that theology by its very nature must renounce any claim to possess truth in its own theological statements, for those theological statements are only truthful when they point away from themselves to the one Truth of God as their absolute prius and ground. Looked at from another aspect this is the epistemological significance of the Incarnation, for Jesus Christ himself is the Way and the Truth and the Life, and theological thinking is thinking grounded in the objectivity of the concrete act of God in him, and is thinking that is wholly determined by its object, God become man, the Word made flesh, full of grace and truth.
Nevertheless, while theology must be concerned with its own proper object, and only within the bounds imposed by that object take up the problems posed by philosophical realism and idealism, it must seek to articulate its knowledge within the same realm of thinking that is occupied by philosophy and every other science. Hence it cannot but make use of the forms of thought and speech which it finds in that realm. Its task will be to maintain throughout its own proper concern and not allow it to be subordinated to ways of thinking that are not appropriate to its proper object, and therefore it must shape the forms of thought and speech which it inherits into tools that will really serve its specifically theological purpose.
This is a problem of which Barth is acutely aware. On the one hand, it has led him to grasp more profoundly the objectivity of the Word and to move over from an idealist into a fundamentally realist theology, but on the other hand, it has helped Barth to find a way of articulating his realist understanding of the Word of God within the essentially dynamic and critico-idealist style of modernity, and yet in such a way that it breaks through the framework of every form of thinking in its determined obedience to follow the way that the Word of God has actually taken in Jesus Christ in revelation and reconciliation. His contribution to the history of theology must be measured by the success of his critique of the one-sidedly realist theology of the Middle Ages, and the one-sidedly idealist theology of modern Protestantism, and by the extent to which he has learned from both in articulating a constructive dogmatics that presses into the objective unity of all Christian theology and radically calls in question the deviations from that unity grounded in the divine self-revelation in Jesus Christ.
(b) The scientific problem
The discussion between theology and philosophy serves to drive theology back upon its proper object; otherwise it betrays itself and loses its own basic concern. But if it is driven back upon its object and learns to think out its problems strictly from within the limits and restrictions to thinking laid down by the nature of its object, and develops a rational method in accordance with the nature of its object, then is not theological activity methodologically more like that of an exact science than of philosophy? If that is so, then theology must clarify its own procedure over against the other sciences which operate within the same realm of human thinking as it does, especially where that thinking takes a strictly a posteriori form. Our concern here is not to trace out the relations between the doctrines of the Christian faith, as they are given constructive form in Barth’s theology, with the results of modern scientific research, but rather to consider the problem of scientific method as it is posed from the
