As A Tangent

I/1 § 4: The Word of God in its Threefold Form

4. The Unity of the Word of God

This short section is a summary just longer than one published page, supplemented by a long bibliographical excursus which indicates the historical doctrinal sources for Barth's doctrine of the threefold form of the Word of God.

The Word of God is "one and the same, whether we regard it as revelation, as the Bible, or as proclamation." (I/1/136)  Barth admits no distinction of degree or value whatsoever.  "By becoming the Word of God in virtue of the actuality of revelation, the Bible and proclamation are also the Word, the one of Word of God within which there can be neither more nor less." (ibid.)  Barth does admit that the first form (revelation) establishes the other two, but revelation in itself "never meets us anywhere in abstract form" and "of [revelation] precisely our knowledge is only indirect, arising out of Scripture or in proclamation." (ibid.)  This boils down to three logically interconnected but grammatically distinct statements:

1. "The revealed Word of God we know only from the Scripture adopted by Church proclamation, or from Church proclamation based on Scripture."
2. "The written Word of God we know only through the revelation which makes proclamation possible, or through the proclamation made possible by revelation."
3. "The proclaimed Word of God we know only by knowing the revelation attested through Scripture, or by knowing the Scripture which attests revelation." (ibid.)

The singular analogy for this doctrine of the Word of God in its three-fold form "is itself the sole analogy to the doctrine which will fundamentally occupy us in unfolding the concept of revelation: the doctrine of the three-in-oneness of God." (ibid.)  In the Trinitarian language we shall encounter the same "fundamental determinations and mutual relationships" of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with revelation, Scripture (written), and proclamation.  Both the "decisive difficulty" and the "decisive clarity" is the same in both cases. (I/1/136-137)

Barth thus reveals to us not only the real basis of his doctrine of the Word of God, but his own manner of working: in the end, all the decisive or distinctive claims his theology makes are made by analogy within distinctive and characteristic Christian language of (above all) the Trinity.  This is an example of what George Lindbeck termed linguistic isomorphism (loosely: one-to-one mapping between members of differing complex sets: an embedding that is surjective as well as injective).

The concluding excursus traces Barth's understanding of the three-form forms of the Word of God in Luther, as brought forward by Johann Gerhard, Francis Turretin, although the doctrine of inspiration "signifies a freezing up of the connection between Scripture and revelation." (I/1/139)  The terms of the relationship in the Reformed Scholastics became frayed, "a divine private institution for such-and-such a number of private individuals" i.e. the elect.  The inroads of theological Modernism were prepared in such a breakdown. "It is not philosophy of the world become critical, but the Church's own theology become uncritical, ceasing to understand itself from its centre," which is "responsible" for the breakdown of the terms by which the Church could understand its own proclamation.(I/1/140)

Barth's agenda is then laid out in less formal terms than in the "big print" of the main text of the Church Dogmatics: "The task set us of today ... must consist ... in taking proclamation in particular with seriousness as the Church's act, in and through which service should be rendered not to [humans] but to God, in and through which God comes to express Himself; and then, starting from the point, we must understand once more, that and in what sense first the Bible, and first of all revelation, is really God's Word." (ibid.)

Thus proclamation, understood as a recovery of that which is authentic in evangelical (Protestant, and Reformed) theology, is at the center of Barth's project, and the center in turn of that project is the three-fold distinctive unity of the Word of God.

I/1 § 4: The Word of God in its Threefold Form

3. The Revealed Word of God

What is the relationship between the forms of the Word of God: proclamation, Scripture, and revelation?  "The Bible is the concrete medium by which the Church recalls God's revelation in the past, is called to expect revelation in the future, and is thereby challenged, empowered, and guided to proclaim." (I/1/124-125)  The relation of these three forms is irregularly triangular: neither of them is in itself either God's past revelation (the Bible) or the expected future revelation (proclamation).  The promise in proclamation rests upon the attestation of past revelation in the Bible: this attestation is its "decisive relation between the Church and revelation." (I/1/125)

To attest here means "to point in a definite direction beyond oneself to something else." (ibid.)  Attestation is the service of that "something else," the distinctive service of the Prophet and the Apostle.  The canon or staff founded upon those Prophets and Apostles "is moved by a living, outstretched hand, as the water was moved in the Pool of Bethesda." (ibid.) The biblical witnesses speak and write "not for their own sake ... but under the orders of that something else." (I/1/125-126).  It is not a question of self-assertion, or of an immanent teleology, but by their own agency --(here) in a particular sense "that it is solely and exclusively the something else which compels and limits the perfect or imperfect human organ from without, the thing attested itself, which is what makes a [human] a witness." (I/1/126) (Barth thus approaches the famous problem of double agency, but properly defers further expansion until a later time.)

The Biblical witness thus claims no authority for itself: the Something else is its authority, and by its own agency.(I/1/126, translator's capitalization)  "Therefore, the Word of God is an event, revelation and the Bible are one in fact, and word for word at that." (I/1/127) Here Barth's personalism, his sense of the Holy as Event, as an encounter unique in kind and as free comes clear in a manner which shapes every subsequent paragraph of the Church Dogmatics.

But this unity (revelation and Bible are one in fact word-for-word) is not always just one thing (i.e. a formal property), but an event.  On the one hand "in revelation we are concerned with Jesus Christ to come, who ultimately in the fulness of time did come.  Literally we are, therefore, concerned with the singular Word spoken, and this time really directly, by God Himself."(ibid.)  But in Scripture we see "human attempts to repeat and reproduce, in human thoughts and expressions, this Word of God in definite human situations."  This is the difference which "beggars all analogy." (ibid.)  "In the one case Deus dixit, in the other Paulus dixit.  These are two different things." (ibid.)  But "where the Word of God is event, it is not two different things, but becomes one" and there "revelation is to be regarded primarily as the superior, the Bible primarily as the subordinate principle." (I/1/127-128)

"Revelation engenders the Scripture which attests it." (1/1/129)  This is both irritatingly circular to logicians, but safeguards the freedom and grace of God whose Word becomes manifest in Scripture and Proclamation in the event of Jesus Christ.  Therefore, "the document of a peculiar behest ... could become the canon ... the publisher of revelation." (ibid.)  "God was with us, with us His enemies, with us who were struck and shattered by His wrath.  God was with us, with the reality and completeness with which God does what He does."  God was with us, but not as fragments of human history usually happen, without completeness, "but in mid-stream of becoming, being moved only by itself in mid-ocean of the unsettled, changeable, and self-changing, the fixed event, the fulness of time." (I/1/130)

Therefore we do not really understand the Bible from our own standpoint: the Bible gives itself to be understood, of us being brought to listen to the Bible as God's Word. (1/1/131).  Any Christian who has had the experience of suddenly intuiting what a previously opaque passage of Scripture might really mean knows this truth as a conviction --not a logical "addition to content" but an un-looked-for new point of view.  This is the freedom of God's grace in revelation, "the event in which God, being free, allows this free grace scope to operate." (I/1/132) (See also my comment about Gadamer, below.)

In conclusion, the every state of revelation is a process of revelation, as conditioned by the very act of revelation. (I/1/134)  "Revelation in fact does not differ from the person of Jesus Christ, and again does not differ from the reconciliation that took place in Him." (ibid.)

But if we mean by the word "revelation" "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us," then we are asserting something that is to be grounded only within the Trinity; namely, by the Will of the Father, by the mission of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, by the eternal decree of the Triune God, i.e. not otherwise than as the knowledge of God from God, as knowledge of the Light in the Light. . . . the Bible means this absolutely solely, and in the knowledge of this absolute the Church by means of the Bible reminds herself of past revelation, and for that very reason has to maintain a dogmatics which operates not in empty space, but in the area of the Church." (I/1/134)

In short, whereas the Christ of the Second Coming is none other than He that came, "'God with us' becomes actual for us hic et nunc [here and now] as the promise received and grasped in faith, because it is the divine act illic et tunc [there and then]" (I/1/135)  Jesus Christ speaks for Himself in Scripture, needs no witness save His Holy Spirit, and is glad of the faith of His own in the promise received and grasped.  This origin of the Word of God is independent, unsurpassable, and "materially" first as the form of the Word of God.

By way of commentary, this sub-section certainly reminds me of the frustrating circularity which I first experienced in Barth, and which definitely put me off Barth at that time.  In the decades since I have come to see that Barth's deep and thorough-going concern to safeguard the freedom of God's grace requires him to posit a circular relationship between the forms of the Word of God as the logically prior (if not materially original) foundation by which he can establish the independence of ecclesiastical dogmatics from human philosophy --as laudable as human philosophy may be. 

Barth must posit the unsurpassability and independence of the Word of God so that humans do not wind up controlling that Word, but are instead brought to listen to it in faith.  This circularity is both a claim and a corrective of the immanent philosophies both of liberal Protestantism and scholastic Roman Catholic dogmatics. Barth's line of thinking about Scripture has a certain generall similarity with Gadamer's understanding of spiel (play), and of the conditioning and conditioned role played by tradition, expressed most fully in his Truth and Method (1960 --but decades in the making).  Gadamer the philosopher has clearly differing aims from Barth the dogmatic theologians, yet it is no wonder that those who read Barth sometimes find in Gadamer a consonant approach (with a differing subject matter).  Barth can also be subject to criticism similar to Habemas criticism of Gadamer: that Barth may be too reliant upon a tradition which --in a post-holocaust world-- needs to be questioned radically.

I/1 § 4: The Word of God in its Threefold Form

2. The Written Word of God.

The "written Word of God" is a topic much closer to the root of Protestant Christian identity, and as such most of Barth's comments here seem to be written with Protestant disputes in mind.

But he does not begin with Protestants, but again with a Catholic understanding, since the Church must proclaim upon the basis of the recollection of past revelation, and in hope and expectation of future revelation.  The Church speaks on the basis that God's Word has already been spoken, and hence in recollection.

Such recollection might mean the "actualisation of a revealedness of God, originally immanent in the existence of every [human] .... [and] would thus be identical with the discovery ... of the timeless essential state of [the human itself], namely, [humans'] relationship to the eternal or absolute." (I/1/111)  Barth in a supportive excursus traces this view to St. Augustine's memoria, and its connection with Platonic anamnesis.  Thus the Church could be founded upon herself as the Church "in order, by an ever-new return to herself as the Church --and that precisely would be the recollection of God's past revelation" (I/1/112).  In a rhetorical excursus, Barth quips that "the Neoplatonist and the Catholic Churchman might obviously exist very well in personal union in Augustine." (ibid.)

Based upon reasoning from such a concept of divine freedom or power, no reason can exist why this should not be the state of affairs: but such a reason does consist in the fact "that God has not made this use of His freedom or power."  In other words, it could be so, but in fact the witness of the written Word of God points us "in a totally different direction." (ibid.)

On the basis of exegesis --Barth's "exegetical path"-- the Church "has not the confidence to appeal, for her venture of proclamation, to herself as the fountain of the divine Word." (ibid.)  Rather, the Church ventures proclamation on the basis of the commission, object, judgment, event "in recollection of which she is accredited in her proclamation." (I/1/113)  Jesus Christ, head of the Church, "possesses the Church in Himself, but not the Church Him in herself."  There is no interchangeable relationship: "He is immanent in Her only because He transcends her." (ibid.)  Concretely, over against the Church stands an entity like the church as a phenomenon, yet different from and superior to it: Holy Scripture.  "It is the bolt here actually thrust home against the Platonic anamnesis." (ibid.)

Simply Holy Scripture by tells us what God's past revelation (is), which we have to recollect.  It is the canon, the measure or regula fidei.  Hence the church is not just left alone, but the Scripture founds the Church's proclamation as object, as the judgment to which her proclamation is liable.  But it is not an abstract general principle; rather the connection is determinative of the content of proclamation: an order received, an obligation incurred.  Holy Scripture is a Church document, proclamation in writing, the nub of the Church's life: preaching today is a continuation of the same event (or series of events) that finds Jeremiah and Paul at once end and the preacher of the Gospel today at the other end. (I/1/114)

Since Holy Scripture is in itself the deposit of proclamation (prophetic, apostolic) made in the past by human mouths, this raises the question of succession or vicariate for the Church's Lord.  According to Barth Protestant Christians cannot initially take exception to the Roman Catholic definition of this vicariate, because that there is succession was a concept well-founded in early tradition and Patristic writers.  "...The difference between the evangelical and the Catholic view consists here too not in the matter of the That but in the matter of the How. . . . [and] is directly singly and solely against the fact that Tu es Petrus, etc. is mechanically taken over the head of the first Peter to every succeeding Roman bishop as the second, third, and hundreth Peter, as the succession . . . could be other than pneumatic, or as if being pneumatic it could be tied down to the profane fact of such a list of bishops." (I/1/116)  By this view Peter, the apostolate, and Holy Scripture cease to be a free power in the Church and over against the Church, "because on this presupposition the Church is once more left to herself ..." (ibid.)  And an additional oral, unwritten tradition could "thinly" apply here, but in fact in such unwritten tradition "The Church is not addressed, but is engaged in a dialogue with herself" because such unwritten tradition lacks objective stability. (I/1/118)

The concrete authority of free Holy Scripture requires also a thorough-going distinction between Text and commentary.   "The very exegesis without which the norm cannot attain to validity as a norm is thus also a sign of the standing danger of a confiscation of the Bible by the Church." (I/1/119) Any exegesis stands in danger of become imposition rather than exposition, and deteriorate into a dialogue of the Church with itself.  But self-defence of the text must be left to the text itself: a free, objective reality which confronts the life of the Church with a word of judgment and grace.

In Barth's final analysis the canon is the Canon simply because it is so: "it imposes itself as such." (I/1/121)  This reflects the fundamental free reality of the Word of grace:

Scripture of this content sets it natural bounds to recollection in the form of self-dialogue; that is, if "Immanuel, with us, sinners!" holds good, then our own deepest ground of being, watever we may hold regarding it, at least cannot be God's past revelation, then our coming to ourselves --however significant, for that matter, such a coming may be--has nothing to do with returning to God's revelation.  Scripture of this content must remain confronting the life of the Church . . . as the criterion that refuses to be dissolved into the historical life of the Church." (I/1/121-122)

"The Bible is God's Word" is a confessional statement: we confess and acknowledge remembrance of God's past revelation and hope for God's future, as the warrant and ground for proclamation in the present.  It is a confession of faith "that hears Gd Himself speak in the human word of the Bible." (1/1/123)  This must be allowed as true "as a description of the act of God in the Bible ... whatever the experiences may be which we have or do not have in that connection." (ibid.)  This act of God is an event, not that humans reach out to the Bible, but that the Bible has reached out, and reaches out, to humans.  "The Bible therefore becomes God's Word in this event, and it is to its being in this becoming that the tiny word "is" relates, in the statement that the Bible is God's Word." (I/1/124)

This cuts equally against Roman Catholic "mechanical" dogmatics as well as liberal Protestant interpretation in which religious experience plays a vital role in hearing God's Word in Scripture (i.e., Schleiermacher, Bushnell, etc.)

Barth's commitment to the Word of God as Event here is difficult to hear, because humans always want an external criterion by which to measure how and why God's Word is in Holy Scripture.  Barth has certainly been accused of a certain arbitrariness here (and elsewhere): God's Word simply imposes itself in Holy Scripture.  And the sheer "given-ness" of Word of God as Event is hard to avoid here --the alternative being some human conception, "with which we were in a position to measure the Bible, and on the basis of it to assign it tis distinctive position." (I/1/120).  In that case our hearing of God's Word in Holy Scripture is logically dependent upon the wisdom of our (or the Church's) self-dialogue, although it would be a self-dialogue concerned with the Bible.

Barth is trying to move beyond the Church's self-dialogue about the Bible (ever a clear and present danger in theological education!) to a hearing of God's Word Itself in the event of hearing Holy Scripture.  The wisdom of the traditional prayer (included in Anglican and Episcopal worship since 1549) "blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scripture(s) to be written for our learning" (placed by Cranmer et al. 1549 in Advent, but in the 1979 Book on the penultimate Sunday of Pentecost) is that it recognizes God's role in establishing "all Holy Scripture(s)" as a historical fact independent of the Church's control, and which confronts the Church with God's judgment and grace.

Barth does note, however, "the great historical example of [the re-discovery of the objective reality of the Canon], given to the Church in virtue of its content, is the early period of the Reformation.  What was enacted in Wittenberg and Zürich in those twenty, in Geneva, in those thirty, years of the 16th century, is like a book of illustrations ..." (I/1/122)  As a historian, this poses an interesting dilemma: the events of those specific times and places takes a place very close to the inner reality of Scripture.  In this case, Church History is not just the secondary (though important) discipline Barth described in I/1/3 but runs the danger of either being reduced to a "a book of illustrations" of a particular doctrinal position, or of being only partially understood.  Much of the reality of Wittenberg, Zürich, and Geneva --and of Strasbourg, Cologne, Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere-- was a great deal messier and less amenable to reduction to "a book of illustrations." 

Barth does not make his own position dependent upon the truth of any historical interpretation of those times and places, so much as imply that those times and places take an important place in "holy memory" --a memory which is always perilous.  Would the Church now want to affirm everything Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Bucer, Cranmer, et al. did, or only some things?  Upon which basis? "Great historical examples" of any doctrinal position or subscribed human idea have a funny way of escaping intellectual control and confronting those who hold them with the sheer otherness or contrariness of other human beings acting in all their historical contingency and agency.

I/1 § 4 : The Word of God in its Threefold Form

Concluding Excursus to 1. The Word of God as Preached: Apostolic Succession

Barth's concluding excursus to the first section of §4 is really an article in its own right, and deserves careful reading.

Barth's point of departure if Adolf von Harnack's essay Christus praesens--Vicarius Christi, published in 1927. (For full citation see I/1/106.)  Barth not only criticizes von Harnack, but offers an illuminating evangelical critique of the "traditional" (that is, Tridentine--Vatican 1) Roman Catholic position regarding doctrinal change and the concept of Church potestas.

This critique is raised by the issue of succession to Christ, traditionally referred to as the vicariate, and in particular by Barth's concluding phrase of §4, "The word of God preached now means, in this fourth and innermost circle, [human] language about God, in which and through which God Himself speaks about Himself."  So who speaks now?  Hence the issue of succession of vicariate, and the potestas or power of the Church to speak: which human in particular has the character or marks to do this?

Barth begins by drawing a long chain of patristic and 16th-century reflection, begining with Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, and Augustine, and then Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin, with attention to "the well-known distinction of the Bishop's office" (I/1/108), and Barth (in contrast with von Harnack) takes no exception to the though of the vicariate or succession in itself.  The "evangelical" dissent to Roman Catholic dogmatics "cannot touch the fact of this vicariate or succession, but only the manner of it." (I/1/109).  Barth identifies three questions:

1. How does a human become vicarius Christi, meaning a (or the) successor of Peter?
2. How does this succession arise?
3. In what does this vicariate or succession consist?

Barth summarizes the Roman Catholic (Vatican 1) position: a human joins at the foot of a list of bishops; in arises in a character which a Bishop or priest receives for life upon ordination, and consists in an authority permanently peculiar to the Church office, to draw up and publish unalterable definitions in matters of faith and morals.  "We ask: To what extent can the exercise of such an authority ... still be regarded as service to God? To what extent have we still to deal with a representation here, and not rather with a replacement of Christ?" (I/1/109)

Barth realized that the traditional Roman Catholic response "is a truly significant attempt to come to terms with the problem of real proclamation."  Barth locates the real difference between evangelical and Roman Catholic dogmatics in the concept of person: "a personal lordship (i.e. of Christ) must be a free lordship.  A personal presence must be such that along with it there is a possibility of absence.  A personal gift must be faced with the possibility of its refusal.  And precisely this limitation of Church powers by the Person of Christ must prove the Church to be the true Church, serving Christ ... But it is just this limitation that is excluded by the doctrine of the historical succession, of the character indelibilis and of the possibility of infallible definitions.  Therefore we must reject this doctrine..." (I/1/110)

After a long chain of references to Reformers and reformation documents, Barth concludes:

"Does the act of Christ, real proclamation, the Word of God preached, belong to the Church office and therefore to [a human's] act, or on the contrary ... are office and act bound to the act of Christ, to the realisation of proclamation introduced by God's initiative, to the Word of God preached?  This question, from the standpoint of our thesis, is the puzzling cleft which has run right through the Church of four hundred years." (I/1/111).

Barth's treatment of the question of succession to Christ reveals his "personalism," his enduring recourse to the discourse of the person of Christ: a real, free, and historical agency initiated by God, and freely gracious to humans (freely in the sense that it does not depend upon human initiative or response).  Elsewhere Barth's discourse cuts equally against a variety of "conservative evangelical" teaching which stresses the automatic authenticity of proclamation based upon a particular definition of inerrant, infallible Scripture.  The problem of the free Word of God both proclaimed by humans and at the sole initiative of God's grace, viewed through Barth's personalist discourse, is a consistent theme throughout the Church Dogmatics.

I/1 § 4 : The Word of God in its Threefold Form

1. The Word of God as Preached

In §§ 2 and 3 Barth set out some of the formal disciplinary boundaries for understanding the teaching of the Church, and the task of dogmatics to reflect upon its message and mission self-critically.  He only touched upon the real content of church proclamation, however, since his subject was "prolegomena:" those things which (he felt) must be said first in order that the most important things may later be said clearly.  In §4 Barth begins to formulate these most important things by turning to the major concept which undergirds all the Church Dogmatics: the Word of God.

Rather than starting from a purely theoretical viewpoint, Barth further turns to the most obvious referent of "the Word of God:" the weekly (or daily) sermon --ordinary proclamation in church.  The presupposition which makes proclamation proclamation "and therewith the Church the Church" is the life-function of preaching: this actual event in which human words can become the Word of God.

Barth finds four decisive connections between "dogmatic prolegomena" (which responds to the question: how are dogmatics possible?) and the concept of proclamation (when and where does the Word of God happen?).  These four connections "may be compared with four concentric circles." (I/1/99)

1. The Word of God is the commission upon the givenness of which proclamation must rest, if it is to be real proclamation.  God's word signifies God's positive behest: we cannot validate it humanly because we cannot grasp it -- but it is active when and where it wills to be there and to be active. (I/1/100)  "Real proclamation thus means the Word of God preached, and the Word of God preached means, in this first and outermost circle, [human] language about God on the basis of an indication by God Himself fundamentally transcending all human causation, and so devoid of all human basis, merely occurring as a fact and requiring to be acknowledged."  (I/1/101)

2. The Word of God is the object which as such must be given to proclamation, in order that it may be real proclamation.  "Real proclamation thus means God's Word preached, and God's Word preached means, in this second circle, [human] language about God on the basis of God's self-objectification, which is neither present nor predictable nor relatable to any design, but is real solely in the freedom of His grace, in virtue of which from time to time He wills to be the object of this language, and is so according to His own good
pleasure." (I/1/102-103)

3. The Word of God is the judgment in virtue of which proclamation can alone become real proclamation.  The truth question intrudes here.  Usual human truth is to be judged partly by the nature of its object, partly also by the situation and desire of the speaker.  (It uses embedded forms of life, to use another vocabulary from Wittgenstein.)  But proclamation as such (in both Word and Sacrament) presupposes that neither the nature of the object nor the situation or desire of the speaker are or can become sufficiently clear as to enable a human to judge the truth of the Word of God.  Barth never denies other criteria, but this one criterion is beyond human grasp.  Humans cannot but 1) recollect this one criterion different in kind from all others, given to our knowledge without it having been known to anyone and 2) expect that this criterion (which at present we really do not know, or know only through that recollection) will give itself again.  This recollected and expected criterion of truth, is the Word of God. (I/1/103-104)  "This criterion we cannot handle.  It is the criterion which handles itself." . . . "Real proclamation, therefore, means the Word of God proclaimed, and the Word of God proclaimed now means, in this third inner circle, [human] language about God which, according to God's own judgment which cannot be anticipated, and never passes into our control ... is true language and therefore language to be listen to, language which rightly demands obedience." (I/1/104).

4. Finally, the Word of God is the event itself, in which proclamation becomes real proclamation.  For Barth, this is the decisive word.  "It is the miracle of revelation and of faith when . . . proclamtion to us is not a human volition and execution qualified in some way, but also and primarily and decisively God's own act, when for us [human] language about God is not only [human] language, but also and primarily and decisively God's own language." (I/1/104)  Not only fully human --but primarily and decisively God's.  Human volition and execution (i.e. performance) it not omitted, does not simply vanish.  As Christ became truly human and divine, so real proclamation becomes an event on the level of all other human events.  The human element is also created by God --and becomes a factor over against God only in the state of disobedience, i.e. our state of sin.  "Without depriving the human side of its freedom, its earthly substance, its humanity, without dissolving the human subject or turning its action into a mechanical event, God is the subject from whom the human action must acquire its new, true name." (I/1/106)  The Word of God means, in this fourth and innermost circle, [human] language about God, in which and through which God Himself speaks about Himself. (ibid.)

Characteristically (seen by now) Barth defends his four circles in a long bibliographic excursus in which he compares his outline with a "fine essay" by Adolf von Harnack which faces the problem of the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Church's potestas, right down to the doctrine of papal infallibility.

One can immediately regard how closely Barth interweaves his personalist understanding of revelation, his understanding of Word as Event, with the two natures of Christ reflected in the very grammar of the Proclamation of the Word of God.  Contrary to all institutional structures, this is a radically contingent understanding of Church proclamation as rising and falling with the moment of the presence of the free grace of God.  No wonder this has been regarded as intolerable innovation by Berkouwer and Van Til (on the Protestant right) and misunderstood as a dialectical distraction (ultimately) by Roman Catholic readers such as von Balthasar.