1. The Question as to the Knowability of the Word of God
After a long hiatus (eight months), I am resuming this blog and returning to Barth's text and voice.
At the very beginning of this section, Barth offers a recapitalation of his argument thus far. (He will do so again at the beginning of §7.)
- In §3 the mandated content of Church proclamation is in the concept of the Word of God; dogmatics as the scholarly examination of Church proclamation naturally follows suit;
- In §4 the entity signified by the concept "The Word of God" is real in Proclamation, Scripture, and Revelation;
- in §5 the inquiry turned to the nature of this concept and entity, and it showed God's language, God's act, and God's mystery as its three distinct but not different determinations.
Barth's own preference might be to proceed immediately to the basis for these finding, to a preliminary determination of the concept of dogmatics. But first, in view of previous critiques, he addresses specifically the question of the knowability of the Word of God.
Of course, the concept of Church proclamation (as well as Church dogmatics) obviously implies or takes for granted that it is possible for humans to hear the Word of God, to utter it, and to know it. (I/1/213) Barth immediately carefully qualifies this statement. It does not apply to human existence in general as a kind of innate human ability or categorical capability, but only in the definite area (or arena) of human existence, the Church. But even in this limited aspect, it is humans who are called to hear and utter the Word of God --very particular humans, in very particular situations. Otherwise the entire concept of the Word of God is objectless and meaningless, "and the Church a place of self-deceptions."(I/1/214) This is of course the burden of the "new atheist" critique of theism, and hence of Christianity.
Barth suggests ahead of time here his sense of the Church as encounter, event, or confrontation: not as a structure or institution:
In the concept of the Church as a place where the truth is spoken and heard, and in the concept of Church proclamation, and dogmatics as a sensible form of activity itself, it is taken for granted that knowledge of the Word of God is attainable by men. (ibid.)
How far this is from the natural knowledge of God implied limit-situations for all humans, by a Tillich or a Rahner!
But as knowers especially in this case, humans are got at by known object. They exist no longer without it, but with it," with entire trust with which they think of it ... as true reality, as true in its existence and nature." This truth has come home to believers personally; they have become the property of its truth. In this case, "A knowing becomes knowledge when [the human] becomes a responsible withness to its content."(ibid.)
In this way:
- Knowledge of the Word of God is the presupposition of the Church;
- The Church is the presupposition of knowledge of the Word of God.
(Church as encounter, event, and mystery, not as institution or organization.) The question properly is, how can [humans] know the Word of God? (I/1/215)
Barth immediately delimits this claim further:
1. The question is not, "how do [humans] know the Word of God?" The question is not about the reality of their knowledge. The answer to the correct formulation can only consist "in repeating the Biblical promise given to the Church and pointing to its coming fulfiment, insofar as then the Word of God itself was joined to this human repetition ... and undertook the real answer." (ibid.)
2. The queston is not, how can humans in general know the Word of God? "Where the Word of God is known and so may become known, there it must be spoken, there it must have reached such and such [humans] as divine call. God knows them ... as true hearers and proclaimers ... who for that very reason as livng human members in the Body of Christ, constitute the Church." (I/1/216)
3. The question is not, "how do Christians know the Word of God," insofar as it would have to be qualified as "called and chosen Christians." God knows those who become true hearers and proclaimers; humans know other humans simply as those who face "us with the question how it should be possible for them to know the Word of God."
4. Barth must proceed with philosophical and epistemological indefiniteness, not only to avoid predetermining an answer to the question, but so as to respond to the question in such as away that the truth of the Word of God does not depend upon a philosophical or epistemological formulation which may necessarily change with the discourse of those studies. "The concept of the knowledge of it [the Word of God] might literally not be commensurable in the ultimate sense with the concept of the knowledge of other objects, or with a general concept of knowledge." (I/1/217)
