Karl Barth's Standing Desk

Last night I was involved with a Barth reading group hosted by Dr. George Hunsinger at the Center for Barth Studies. Tucked away in a corner several feet away from where I was seated was a very special piece of furniture - Karl Barth's standing desk. I snapped a few photos for you, dear reader:

George Hunsinger: Barth On What It Means To Be Human

George Hunsinger: What Christ Did Was Effective For All

Karl Barth Student Reading Group, tonight @ 7pm at the PTS Library

If you're coming, I'll see you there...

Join us this Fall for the New Jersey Barth Reading Group

For those in the New Jersey/Central Jersey/Jersey Shore area, please join me and others interested in theology each week for a discussion of the topic: "The Missional Church: Its Gathering, Upbuilding, and Sending"

Our first meeting is set for Monday, September 22nd, from 10:30am-Noon at the Monmouth Church of Christ. We will meet each Monday at this time in the church library.

Our guide for this topic will be a weekly reading of the following paragraphs in Karl Barth's magnum opus, the Church Dogmatics:

§62, “The Holy Spirit and the Gathering of the Christian Community” (CD IV,1)

§67, “The Holy Spirit and the Upbuilding of the Christian Community” (CD IV, 2)

§72, “The Holy Spirit and the Sending of the Christian Community.” (CD IV, 3)

Everyone is invited and you don't need special training or theological knowledge to join the group and be helped by these readings - they are accessible, readable, and theologically rich. Please join us and share this post with your friends!

Blogging with Barth: CD 2.1 §27.1 "The Hiddenness of God" pp. 179-204

Barth lecturing in Gwatt on July 6, 1941.

Check here for previous posts in the "Blogging with Barth" series or check here for a detailed reading schedule for the Church Dogmatics with links to the respective posts I've written to accompany each day's reading.

The Leitsatz (thesis statement) for §27 states: "God is known only by God. We do not know Him, then, in virtue of the views and concepts with which in faith we attempt to respond to His revelation. But we also do not know Him without making use of His permission and obeying His command to undertake this attempt. The success of this undertaking, and therefore the veracity of our human knowledge of God, consists in the fact that our viewing and conceiving is adopted and determined to participation in the truth of God by God Himself in grace."

In paragraph §27 ("The Limits of the Knowledge of God") and in subsection §27.1 ("The Hiddenness of God"), Barth begins a review of where we have been:

How far is God known? and how far is God knowable? We have answered these questions in principle in the two previous sections. We may summarise our answer in the statement that God is known by God and by God alone. His revelation is not merely His own readiness to be known, but man’s readiness to know Him. God’s revelation is, therefore, His knowability (179).

Barth wants to now explore the limits of the knowledge of God in this section. He divides the paragraph into two sections, the first dedicated to the topic of the hiddenness of God (which will be covered in this post), and the second devoted to the authenticity of our knowledge of God (which will be covered in the next post).

The limit which is our concern in the first part of this section is the terminus a quo, the point of beginning and departure in the knowledge of God. We have said that knowledge of God is the presupposition of all Christian doctrine. But this means that it is the basis of the Church and its confession, the basis of the faith of all those who, in the Church and by the Church, are called to fellowship with God and thus to their own salvation and the glorifying of God. Knowledge of God in the sense hitherto defined by us as the knowledge of God which is objectively and subjectively established and led to its goal by God Himself, the knowledge of God whose subject and object is God the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit, is the basis—and indeed the only basis—of the love of God which comes to us and the praise of God which is expected of us (180).

Thus the hiddenness of God is the terminus a quo (the starting point) of our knowledge of God.

The terminus a quo of the knowledge of God is therefore the fact that in it we have to do with God Himself by God Himself, in insurpassable and incontestable certainty, and that therefore it is real knowledge of God. We may equally well say (pending more detailed definition) that this will also be the terminus ad quem (ending point) of which we must speak later.

Of course, God is the primary object and subject of this knowledge, and we are secondary subjects.

The fact that it has God not only for its object but also as its origin, and that its primary and proper subject is the Father who knows the Son and the Son who knows the Father in the Holy Spirit, and that it is a sure and perfect and genuine cognition because God is known by God, does not mean either the abrogation, abolition or alteration of human cognition as such, and therefore of its formal and technical characteristics as human cognition. But human cognition is fulfilled in views and concepts. Views are the images in which we perceive objects as such. Concepts are the counterimages with which we make these images of perception our own by thinking them, i.e., arranging them. Precisely for this reason they and their corresponding objects are capable of being expressed by us (181). 

And even though it is our own cognitive capabilities that enable us to understand the knowledge of God, this knowledge is not ultimately attributable to our cognitive capabilities - God is only known by God (183).

At this very point it emerges that although the knowledge of God certainly does not come about without our work, it also does not come about through our work, or as the fruit of our work. At this very point the truth breaks imperiously and decisively before us: God is known only by God; God can be known only by God. At this very point, in faith itself, we know God in utter dependence, in pure discipleship and gratitude. At this very point we are finally dissuaded from trusting and confiding in our own capacity and strength. At this very point we can see that our attempt to answer God’s revelation with our views and concepts is an attempt undertaken with insufficient means, the work of unprofitable servants, so that we cannot possibly ascribe the success of this attempt and therefore the truth of our knowledge of God to ourselves, i.e., to the capacity of our views and concepts. In faith itself we are forced to say that our knowledge of God begins in all seriousness with the knowledge of the hiddenness of God (182-183).

Our knowledge of God begins with the knowledge of the hiddenness of God. What is God's hiddenness? God's hiddenness is God's incomprehensibility. But this is 'incomprehensibility' in the biblical sense, not in any other, particularly the philosophical sense:

With this assertion we confess that, knowing God, we do not comprehend how we come to know Him, that we do not ascribe to our cognition as such the capacity for this knowledge, but that we can only trace it back to God. It is God alone, and God’s revelation and faith in it, which will drive and compel us to this avowal. Without faith we will definitely remain satisfied with the delimitation which we allotted to ourselves. And the lack of seriousness in this delimitation will probably be betrayed in two ways. We shall ascribe to ourselves a capacity for the knowledge of God in opposition to the revelation of God. And we shall, therefore, treat God’s revelation as something which stands at our own disposal, instead of perceiving that the capacity to know God is taken away from us by revelation and can be ascribed to us again only by revelation.

When in Ps. 139:6 it says of God’s action: “It is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it”; or in Job 36:26: “Behold, God is great, and we know him not”: and when Paul calls God invisible (Rom. 1:20, Col. 1:15, 1 Tim. 1:17), we can ascertain from the more immediate and more general contexts of the passages that there is definitely no question here of the terminus ad quem* set up by man himself, but of the terminus a quo* set up by God in His revelation. But this enables us to understand the corresponding voices of the Early Church and its theology, although here we are occasionally faced by the linguistic problem how far they were clear about the fact that, when they spoke of the ἀκαταληψία (incomprehensibility) the incomprehensibilitas, the incomprehensibility of God, they were saying anything basically different from what Plato and Plotinus could also say when they spoke about the inaccessibility of the true and supreme being and the transcendence of the knowledge of this being (184-185).

The assertion of God’s hiddenness (which includes God’s invisibility, incomprehensibility and ineffability) tells us that God does not belong to the objects which we can always subjugate to the process of our viewing, conceiving and expressing and therefore our spiritual oversight and control. In contrast to that of all other objects, His nature is not one which in this sense lies in the sphere of our power. God is inapprehensible (187).

That which we apprehend, which we comprehend, is that which we control. We do not control God or understand him in a human way. How is it that we comprehend God?

The beginning of our knowledge of God—of this God—is not a beginning which we can make with Him. It can be only the beginning which He has made with us (190).

God is invisible and inexpressible because He is not present as the physical and spiritual world created by Him is present, but is present in this world created by Him in His revelation, in Jesus Christ, in the proclamation of His name, in His witnesses and sacraments. He is, therefore, visible only to faith and can be attested only by faith. But this means that He is to be seen only as the invisible and expressed only as the inexpressible, not as the substance of the goal or origin of our seeing and speaking, but because He Himself has given us permission and command to see and speak, and therefore by His Word, and in His free and gracious decision, has given us the capacity to see and speak (190).

We comprehend God because of His revelation. God's hiddenness is a judgment upon humanity:

We thus understand the assertion of the hiddenness of God as the confession of the truth and effectiveness of the sentence of judgment which in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is pronounced upon man and therefore also upon his viewing and conceiving, dispossessing him of his own possibility of realising the knowledge of the God who encounters him, and leaving him only the knowledge of faith granted to him and demanded of him by the grace of God and therefore only the viewing and conceiving of faith (191).

But God's hiddenness is also God's grace because knowing God's hiddenness we know God:

But by this same fact we are already impelled to the positive meaning of the statement. Where we really confess God’s judgment, we also confess God’s grace. The assertion of the hiddenness of God is not, therefore, to be understood as one of despairing resignation, but actually as the terminus a quo of our real knowledge of God, as the fundamental and decisive determination, not of our ignorance, but of our cognisance of God. It affirms that our cognisance of God does not begin in ourselves, since it has already begun in God; namely, in God’s revelation and in faith to Him. The confession of God’s hiddenness is the confession of God’s revelation as the beginning of our cognisance of God (191-192).

Thank goodness for revelation, which give us terms to think about God. Otherwise, left to our own devices (and impotence) to say anything about God, we would always struggle. But we hold on to revelation as the unique source and norm of our knowledge of God:

Only if this assertion is valid are we held fast to the revelation of God as the unique source and norm of our knowledge of God. Indicating its inner limit, it also indicates its external limit. For if we have no capacity of our own to view, conceive and speak in regard to God we are thrown back on the fact that our viewing, conceiving and speaking—whose capacity we must ascribe to God Himself—is necessarily instituted by God’s revelation. We are therefore thrown back upon God’s revelation, not merely in the sense that all cognition is referred back to its object, but in the sense that the knowledge of God is referred back to God as its object and free origin. If this is established, and if, therefore, it may be regarded as certain that the capacity to know and therefore to view and conceive God cannot be reinterpreted as a capacity of man but only understood as a divine gift, then we can take a second step and say that the God who quickens us to faith in Him by His revelation can and may and must be spoken about, so that He can and may and must be viewed and conceived by us. The limit within which this takes place must be remembered. But we are not now concerned only with the limit, but also with the matter itself (196).

Only the Trinitarian God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - can speak properly of God's Self (198-199). God has made God's Self apprehensible in Jesus Christ (199). So, in the end, the incomprehensibility of God is not a reason for silence. God has given us in Jesus Christ, in revelation, something to say and God expects us to say it. God permits us to conceive of him.

...it is finally to be said that labour for the truth in the sphere of human views and concepts and words about God need not be an impossibility, and therefore superfluous, because it is performed in this sphere. Theology can, of course, be sheer vanity. It is this when it is not pertinent, and that simply means—not humble. The pertinence of theology consists in making the exposition of revelation its exclusive task. How can it fail to be humble in the execution of this programme, when it has no control over revelation, but has constantly to find it, or rather be found by it? If we presuppose this happening—and we can, of course, presuppose it only as we pray and work—theology is as little vanity as the “old wife’s” stammering. If she may stammer, surely theology may also try to speak. The attempt may and must be made, within the limits of human cognition, to ask about the truth, to distinguish the true from the false, and continually to carry the “approximation” further—although always knowing that the goal as such is attainable only to faith and not to our viewing and conceiving as such. This means, to seek after better human views and concepts in closer correspondence with their object, and therefore, so far as we are able, to make the witness to the reality of God more complete and clear. If this presupposition is valid—as it can and will be valid—theology can be pursued in the confidence which is not forbidden but commanded us against the background of the hiddenness of God, without any pretensions, but also without any false shame, so much the more so because it is not an arbitrary undertaking, but one which is necessary to the task of the Church’s proclamation. If this presupposition is valid, theology is on firm ground for its undertaking—indeed, on disproportionately firmer ground than all other sciences (203-204).

Blogging with Barth: CD 2.1 §26.2 "The Readiness of Man" pp. 128-178 (Part 2)

Check here for previous posts in the "Blogging with Barth" series or check here for a detailed reading schedule for the Church Dogmatics with links to the respective posts I've written to accompany each day's reading.

The Leitsatz (thesis statement) for §26 states: "The possibility of the knowledge of God springs from God, in that He is Himself the truth and He gives Himself to man in His Word by the Holy Spirit to be known as the truth. It springs from man, in that, in the Son of God by the Holy Spirit, he becomes an object of the divine good-pleasure and therefore participates in the truth of God."

In paragraph §26 ("The Knowability of God") and in subsection §26.2 ("The Readiness of Man"), we continue now with the second post on this second subsection of paragraph 26 (see first post on this section here). In the first part of the paragraph, Barth has been talking about the great problem of natural theology - it purports to open up a second possibility for knowledge of God apart from revelation. Barth now moves on to explore how it is that there is any readiness at all for God. Is there a readiness in humanity for God?

We now return to our line of thought; to the question of the knowability of God understood as the readiness of man. Our deliberations so far have ended with a negative result. Making a postulate, we tried to see how the readiness of man must be constituted as included in the readiness of God. We described it as the openness and therefore the neediness, knowledge, and willingness of man in relationship to grace. Making a further postulate, we also gave to it reality; i.e., we understood this open man expressly as man in the Church, as man placed by the Word of God under judgment, but also under grace. But we saw that even in this man we cannot really discern the man who is opened for the grace of God and therefore the knowability of God. It is not in his reality as such that we find the human readiness enclosed in the readiness of God, about which we ask. His reality as such is the conflict against grace, his attempt to preserve himself and hold his own. Our only positive gain from these considerations is unhappily that they enable us to understand only too well the existence and vitality of natural theology in the Church.

Does this conclusion mean that our main question is to be answered negatively? Is there simply no readiness of man for the knowledge of God? Is the enmity of man against grace, and therefore his closedness against God, the last thing to be said of him? (142).

Problematically, humanity is the enemy of grace:

In spite of all the postulates about what his openness could and must mean, and in spite of all the definitions—however right—of his real determination by the judgment and grace of God, the fact is that finally and in the last resort man is always to be understood as the enemy of grace. And this fact emerges as the annoying indivisible remainder in a division, which does ultimately indicate a certain rule of its divisibility, but for this very reason shews itself not actually to be divided. 

It is to be recommended, not only in dogmatics but also for preaching, for teaching and for the pastoral work of the Church, that this state of affairs be kept quite clearly in mind. In this matter we can come to no conclusion even on the most correct of roads. We cannot reinterpret the man who is an enemy of grace into a friend of grace. Therefore we cannot ascribe to man as such any readiness corresponding to the readiness of God (145).

Is there a readiness in humanity for God, if humanity is left to its own devices? Nein! But to find the answer, we cannot look to what Barth calls, "anthropological postulates" (144). We will need something else to account for the possibility of the knowability of God in humanity. Barth gives us a hint:

It is certainly true that the man who is ready for God is truth and life; but he is not identical with man as such. As truth and life, he needs to be sought, known and found—for the salvation of man as such—beyond man as such, and especially beyond the Christian man as such. It is certainly true that the whole (and wholly dubious) realm of the Christian man has as its true meaning and intention this transcendent man who is ready for God in life and truth (147-148).

Then Barth reveals it...

The only aspect of man under which the picture we have already drawn is actually altered, and the decision investigated (i.e., the readiness of man included in the readiness of God and therefore God’s real knowability) is actually disclosed, is the christological. Anthropological and ecclesiological assertions arise only as they are borrowed from Christology. That is to say, no anthropological or ecclesiological assertion is true in itself and as such. Its truth subsists in the assertions of Christology, or rather in the reality of Jesus Christ alone (148-149).

If we look past Jesus Christ, if we speak of anyone else but Him, if our praise of man is not at once praise of Jesus Christ, the romance and the illusions begin again, and we fall back again into the aspect under which it is impossible to see, or with a good conscience to speak about, the man who is ready for God in life and truth. In Christian doctrine, and therefore in the doctrine of the knowledge and knowability of God, we have always to take in blind seriousness the basic Pauline perception of Colossians 3:3 which is that of all Scripture—that our life is our life hid with Christ in God (149). 

We can, therefore, anticipate the positive answer to our question by stating simply that the readiness of man included in the readiness of God is Jesus Christ. And therefore Jesus Christ is the knowability of God on our side, as He is the grace of God itself, and therefore also the knowability of God on God’s side (150).

Christ is the knowability of God for us. How is this possible?

He is God who is man. This is Jesus Christ. In Him we do not stand outside but inside; we participate in this first and last. In Him the fact that God is knowable is true not only for God Himself, not only between the Father and Son, but for man, for us. For in Him man is ready for God. But what does this mean? What can it mean in view of the fact that man as such is never actually ready for God but closed to Him, because he is not a friend but an enemy of grace, and so turns his back on God’s revelation? Now, we have already heard what it means concretely that Jesus Christ is man. It means that the only begotten Son of God and therefore God Himself, who is knowable to Himself from eternity to eternity, has come in our flesh, has taken our flesh, has become the bearer of our flesh, and does not exist as God’s Son from eternity to eternity except in our flesh. Our flesh is therefore present when He knows God as the Son the Father, when God knows Himself. In our flesh God knows Himself. Therefore in Him it is a fact that our flesh knows God Himself (151).

Barth then asks an important question: How do we come to participate in what Jesus Christ is? (155). It happens by faith and by the Holy Spirit:

It is easy to reply at once with the fact that at this point we are referred to the possibility, necessity and reality of faith. And we shall again be saying something which in itself is no doubt correct. For, indeed, how can the victory of grace, won in Jesus Christ over human enmity against grace, be relevant, valid and saving for us except as we believe in Jesus Christ? (155).

It must be understood wholly from this height of the occurrence in God Himself, when Holy Scripture as a rule expressly describes our participation in the person and work of Jesus Christ as a work of the Holy Spirit (157).

What is faith?

Basically, faith is more than all the transformation which follows it. As the work of the Holy Spirit it is man’s new birth from God, on the basis of which man can already live here by what he is there in Jesus Christ and therefore in truth. Faith is the temporal form of his eternal being in Jesus Christ, his being which is grounded on the fact that Jesus Christ intercedes for us before the Father; that in Jesus Christ we are ready for God in the height of God and therefore also in our depth. Faith extinguishes our enmity against God by seeing that this enmity is made a lie, a lie confessed by ourselves as such, expiated and overcome by Jesus Christ, trodden underfoot and destroyed (158). 

Barth then asks: How far are we ourselves, in Jesus Christ, not outside but inside with God?

1) We are within on the strength of the fact that Jesus Christ is for us in eternity. (2) We are within in the Holy Spirit. (3) We are within in faith (160). 

So, how then can we speak faithfully about the readiness of man for God?

There is for man, included in the readiness of God, a readiness of man for God and therefore for the knowledge of God. The enmity of man against grace and therefore his closedness against God is not the final and proper thing to be said of man. The final and proper thing to be said of him is rather that we have peace with God (Rom. 5:1), and in this peace we stand in such a relationship to God that the knowability of God which He has bestowed upon us in His grace is received and accepted as such by us. In this our peace with God the circle is closed. In view of it the assertion that God is knowable to us becomes meaningful to us on the human side as well. Now we know where we have to seek this peace and shall find it, and where not. When we speak of this peace, and therefore of the man ready for God to whom God is knowable, we are speaking of Jesus Christ, of the reconciliation of man with God that took place and is eternal in Him the Son of God. It is in this way, and only in this way, that we speak genuinely and really about ourselves, because in the reality of Jesus Christ everything is also accomplished for us that must and can be accomplished; because in eternity He intercedes for us; and because in the Holy Spirit the unity of the Father and the Son becomes effectual among and in us too in the twofold form of faith and the Church. We have only to accept the witness about Jesus Christ, and we have then only to look to Jesus Christ—and it is indeed the work of the Holy Spirit, it is indeed the nature of true faith and of the true Church that this happens—to see the man to whom God is knowable, to see and understand ourselves as those to whom God is knowable. And then we can go on to speak in truth of man in His relationship to God, and there can and will actually be a Christian anthropology and ecclesiology. We must not, of course, look in any other direction than to Jesus Christ (161-162). 

Barth closes the discussion of this paragraph with more reflection upon the problem of natural theology (163-172) and with a historical look at the problems of natural theology writ upon history - the German Christian struggle during the rise of Nazism and World War II. He quotes from the Barmen Declaration, a document he wrote, and the statements in it which opposed the so-called "German Christians" and the ways they embraced natural theology's great trap - its illusory autonomy. 

Blogging with Barth: CD 2.1 §26.2 "The Readiness of Man" pp. 128-178 (Part 1)

Check here for previous posts in the "Blogging with Barth" series or check here for a detailed reading schedule for the Church Dogmatics with links to the respective posts I've written to accompany each day's reading.

The Leitsatz (thesis statement) for §26 states: "The possibility of the knowledge of God springs from God, in that He is Himself the truth and He gives Himself to man in His Word by the Holy Spirit to be known as the truth. It springs from man, in that, in the Son of God by the Holy Spirit, he becomes an object of the divine good-pleasure and therefore participates in the truth of God."

In paragraph §26 ("The Knowability of God") and in subsection §26.2 ("The Readiness of Man"), Barth begins by asserting that humanity's readiness for God is given in God's readiness for humanity:

With and in the fact that God is ready within Himself to be known by man, man is also ready to know Him. There is no presumption in affirming this. It would be rebellion to deny it. Man’s readiness to know God is encompassed and established, delimited and determined by the readiness of God; it is not independent but mediated; subsequent to the readiness of God; called by it out of nothingness into being, out of death into life; utterly dependent of and by itself upon the knowability of God, but in this complete dependence real in the way in which creation generally can only be in its relationship to the Creator (128).

It is within the sphere of this issue that the problem of natural theology is most clearly understood:

In its own way all natural theology circles about the problem of the readiness of man to know God. It does so in its own way, i.e., by elevating the readiness of man into an independent factor, so that the readiness of God is not understood as the only one which comes under consideration, nor is the readiness of man regarded as included within it, and completely dependent upon it. It handles the problem in such a way that alongside the knowability of God in His revelation it affirms a second grounded in another way. It speaks of “another” task of theology besides that of explaining the revelation of God. We have to reject this treatment of the problem (128-129).

God's readiness for humanity is God's grace, and humanity's readiness for God is her need for grace:

As we have seen, the readiness of God is God’s grace. Hence the readiness of man must obviously be his readiness for grace. What does this mean? Obviously his receptivity, his openness for grace; but that means his openness for the majestic, the free, the undeserved, the unexpected, the new openness of God for man established entirely in God’s own authority (129).

Of course, humanity's need should in no way be misconstrued as an openness for grace - in the end this end of the relationship is closed until such time that God opens us to it:

The reality of the life of real Christians, of Church Christians, even of good Protestant Christians, and the reality of the life of the Church as such, nowhere bears witness to an openness of man for grace. If it does witness to it, then it is definitely not this reality as such. On the contrary, this reality as such bears witness with particular eloquence to the degree to which man is in fact and in practice still closed on the side on which he should at all costs be open (134).

Which brings us to the central problem of natural theology - it imagines a second knowability of God that is in actuality not real knowledge of God at all.

...natural theology is no more and no less than the unavoidable theological expression of the fact that in the reality and possibility of man as such an openness for the grace of God and therefore a readiness for the knowability of God in His revelation is not at all evident. Natural theology is very plainly the herald and advocate of this the only evident possibility and reality of man. With this possibility and reality as a starting-point, enquiry will necessarily be made concerning that very different knowability of God. With this as a startingpoint it is possible to maintain a knowability of that kind. Indeed, from this starting-point it necessarily will be maintained. It is the man closed to the readiness of God who cannot and will not let himself be deprived of the fact that a readiness for God is at his disposal even apart from the grace of God. As we have seen, the attempt to preserve and affirm himself is not only the possibility but the deepest reality of his existence, even of his existence as placed in the light of the divine revelation, even of his believing existence. And this attempt certainly cannot end in any other way than with the affirmation that even apart from God’s grace, already preceding God’s grace, already anticipating it, he is ready for God, so that God is knowable to him otherwise than from and through Himself. Nor does it only end with this. In principle it begins with it. For in what does it consist but in the arrogation, preservation and affirmation of the self-sufficiency of man and therefore his likeness with God? (135).

As Barth notes, the tragedy of natural theology is that it assumes the place of revelation and in the end, domesticates it (139).

There is no doubt at all that even in the sphere of the Church, even in its moderate Christian form, natural theology does not really sacrifice its original power and monopoly. On the contrary, it triumphs here as perhaps nowhere else. It even masters revelation. It is even able to change the theology of revelation, which it tolerates and acknowledges alongside itself, and even consciously superordinates to itself, into an image which is only too like itself, and which at bottom is itself nothing but natural theology (140).