Barth’s Dogmatics, §8, God in His Revelation

In this ongoing project, I am taking brief notes on Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. My folks purchased the whole English-language set for me forty years ago, and subsequently I wrote my doctoral dissertation on a portion of Vol. III, part 2. See my December 2, 2018 post for Barth's overall plan for his series.

On one level, this is such a nostalgic venture for me, connecting back to my college library (Greenville University) where I first learned about Barth--and then back to my seminary years at Yale Divinity School and its wonderful New England ambiance--and then to my doctoral degree at University of Virginia, where I focused on Volume III Part 2 of the Dogmatics. In this project, I'm enjoying the process of circling back to an area of study that was so important to my "younger days."

Church Dogmatics has 73 sections within 16 chapters, not including the fragment volume. Section 8
begins Part I (“The Triune God,” sections 8-12) of Chapter II, “The Revelation of God.”

Section 8 of the Dogmatics (pp. 295-347) is “God In His Revelation.” Barth’s summary is: “God’s Word is God Himself in His revelation. For God reveals Himself as the Lord and according to Scripture this signifies for the concept of revelation that God Himself in unimpaired unity yet also in unimpaired distinction is Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness” (p. 295).

In his book An Introduction to Barth’s Dogmatics for Preachers (Westminster Press, 1963), Arnold B. Come writes of this and the next section: "The doctrine of the Trinity is not even part of the Scriptural witness to revelation, let alone revelation itself. But the doctrine, as a work of the church, is a necessary interpretation of Scripture and therefore of revelation and therefore of God himself. The fact that (1) God speaks, (2) in the historical reality of Jesus Christ, and (3) is heard by [human beings], and the fact that this irreducible diversity is represented as the single act of the one God, means that the Biblical witness itself distinguishes among Revealer, Revelation, Revealedness. So church doctrine rightly speakers of one God in three modes of being. Personality in the modern sense belongs to the one God. Yet, since God reveals his self to us, the three irreducible, interdependent modes of his operation, in making himself known must point by analogy to three eternal modes of his being. So God's oneness does not indicate singularity and solitude. Thus the doctrine of the Trinity is occasioned by the church's faith in and proclamation of Jesus Christ as the Word of God (not by the so-called vestigium trinitatis) and rightly stands at the beginning of all dogmatic statement (¶ 8, 9.) (90-91).

In the first part, “The Place of the Doctrine of the Trinity in Dogmatics,” Barth stresses that God revealed himself, through himself (p. 296). The Bible teaches us that God is a triune God, and thus the doctrine of the Trinity must stand at the beginning of dogmatics (p. 303). Remember that Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre has the Trinity at the very end.

The second part, “The Root of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” stresses again that “God’s Word is identical with God Himself” (p. 304). True, the doctrine is “a work of the church,” that is, a “record” of how God is self-revealed (p. 308), and “exegesis” (p. 333). But the doctrine is still God’s self-revelation and self-interpretation. The Lordship and deity of Christ is of course a key aspect of the doctrine, as are the three persons (or ways of being, Seinsweisen) of the Trinity.

The third section takes up the doctrine of the vestigium trinitatis, an Augustinian idea that considers vestiges or analogues of the Trinity within creaturely reality. Not surprisingly, given his aversion to any knowledge of God apart from God's self-revealing, Barth writes that the doctrine is simply the form by which we hear and understand God as triune.