Barth's Dogmatics, §4, the Word of God in its Threefold Form

My blog project for 2019 is to take notes on Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. My folks purchased
whole English-language set for me forty years ago, and subsequently I wrote my doctoral dissertation on a portion of Vol. III, part 2. For this blog project, I’ll study the Dogmatics by paragraphs, taking notes. See my December 2, 2018 post for Barth's overall plan for his series.

Paragraph 4 of Church Dogmatics is "the Word of God in its Threefold Form." "The presupposition which makes proclamation proclamation and therewith makes the Church the Church is the Word of God. This attests itself in Holy Scripture in the word of the prophets and apostles to whom it was originally and once and for all spoken by God's revelation" (I/1, p. 88). Arnold Come summarizes: "The event of God's free self-revelation by his sovereign address to men is his Word. The Word of God never occurs in sheer immediacy. It was objectively and concretely present in Jesus Christ. Proclamation is a recollection of Jesus Christ. Scripture is the precipitate of the earliest proclamation. Both the Written Word, and the Proclaimed Word based upon it, become the Revealed Word when God freely chooses to be immediately present to men through them. So God's speech is his presence in his whole Trinitarian Person" (Barth's Dogmatics for Preachers, p. 89).

The presupposition of the event of proclamation is the Word of God. In this first form of the Word, God's Word is God's positive command, an event in which proclamation becomes real--a new event and an object of human perception. This does not remove the human element from proclamation, but in human preaching and human obedience to God, proclamation is "the even of God's own speaking in the sphere of earthly events," a "new robe of righteousness thrown over" the human words of preaching (p. 95).

Because of the Scripture Canon, the church is not left to its own words. The Word of God as Scripture "it does no seek to be a historical monument but rather a Church document, written proclamation (p. 102). The Church is measured by and comforts to the prophetic and apostolic proclamation of God. Ideally, exegesis lets the canonical text speak. Scripture is a human word of people who anticipated and later saw the Word of God revealed in Christ, and the Bible becomes God's Word in the event of revelation. "The Bible is God's Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that He speaks through it" (p. 109).

The Bible, then, is not God's past revelation but bears witness to past revelation through the event of God's Word. The Bible's authority is that it points to God's revelation as, in Grünewald's "Crucifixion" (above),  John the Baptist points to Christ. The Bible "must continually become God's Word" because of God's freedom to make Godself known (p. 117).

Finally, the unity of God's Word as revealed, written, and preached find analogy in the triunity of God (p. 121). Barth takes on Protestant Orthodoxy's views of scripture in the ensuing fine-print discussion.