spiritual discipline. I usually begin on Allhallowtide (which was this past week), or the First Sunday of Advent.
Earlier this year I began a project 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. See my December 2, 2018 post for Barth's overall plan for his series.
I didn’t get very far with the project because of some other writing. (I visited the Galapagos Islands in March 2019 and was inspired to research and write a long poem about the experience.) But now I want to resume this Barth project and, Lord willing, continue it as this upcoming year’s spiritual discipline.
Paragraph 5 of the Dogmatics (pp. 125-186) is “The Nature of the Word of God.” Barth’s summary is: "The Word of God in all its three forms is God’s speech to [us]. For this reason it occurs, applies and works in God’s act on [us]. But as such it occurs in God’s way which differs from all other occurrence, i.e., in the mystery of God” (125).
In his book An Introduction to Barth’s Dogmatics for Preachers (Westminster Press, 1963), Arnold B. Come writes of this and the previous paragraph: "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. He speaks with the rational power of truth, directed purposively to [humans] in their need of renewal and fulfillment. His speech is concrete contemporary act, with the power to demand an act of decision from [humans] in response to God’s decision about them. We know it is God’s speech because of its mystery: worldly, human thoughts and words both hiding and manifesting God’s free Word. The listening of the ear verges imperceptibly into the hearing of faith, without any explanatory capacity on [our] part. So we must speak of the miracle of the Holy Spirit (¶4, 5)” (Barth's Dogmatics for Preachers, 89-90).
A few quotations that I found interesting:
“[t]o understand God from man is either an impossibility or something one can do only in the form of Christology and not of anthropology (not even a Christology translated into anthropology). There is a way from Christology to anthropology, but there is no way from anthropology to Christology. On the basis of these considerations I must not only decline Gogarten’s invitation to improve my dogmatics by introducing a true anthropology. I must also eliminate all that might seem to be a concession in that direction in my draft of five years ago [his book Die christliche Dogmatik of 1927]” (131). Barth goes on to discuss his wrong direction into existential thought.
“God’s Word means that God speaks…. God’s Word is not a thing to be described nor a term to be defined… It is the truth as it is God’s speaking person, Dei loquentis persona. it is not an objective reality. it is the objective reality, in that it is also subjective, the subjective that is God” (136). He goes on to discuss God’s authority to rule and to call for a decision, never conditioned by human behavior and other variables. But the decision is not “my own particular resolve and choice” but “of being judged and accepted,” of understanding that “I exist in correspondence to God’s Word”—which is good news (161)!
“The Lord of speech is also the Lord of our hearing. The Lord who gives the Word is also the Lord who gives faith. The Lord …. by whose act the openness and readiness of [humans] for the Word are true and actual, not another God but the one God in this way, is the Holy Spirit” (182).
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