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Introduction
Karl Barth is no stranger to the theology circles as some of his work has found itself being critiqued and reworked on by 21st century theologians. His contribution in church dogmatics has been enormous and this can be attested through the Protestant and the Roman Catholics realms. He is well-known for having brought people back to the ways of Martin Luther who himself claimed the necessity of divine revelation, rather than Natural Theology which brought about general revelation, a product of modern theology.
In this study we are going to look at Karl Barth’s understanding of the doctrine of revelation. In an attempt to interpret his doctrine of revelation as objective as possible, we are going to start this study by describing what was happening around Karl Barth when he came up with the doctrine. This section will help us in the rest of the study, whereby we will be looking at his definition of the doctrine of revelation and how Karl Barth’s doctrine of revelation moved away from another theological field of natural theology. To end this study, we are going to reflect on whether such a dogma can be applicable in South African context as dogma is only useful to people when it’s applicable within their context
Karl Barth was born in Switzerland to a conservative church beliefs, of which he grew up in, and went on to study theology and philosophy at the prestige universities in Germany (Hardy, 2005: 22). During his studying life he was afforded to be taught by flamboyant names within the theology discipline at that time, names like Julius Kaftan, Adolf Schlatter, Adolf Von Harnack, Wilhelm Herrmann and Hermann Gunkel. Rather than sticking within the lane he grew up in, he ventured modern theology where he got acquainted with teachings of both philosophy and theology great minds like Schleiermacher, Immanuel Kant and the Ritschlian school which we will later explain how the aforementioned were very important in his understanding of what Christian revelation was.
However, looking back into Barth’s early days after his studies, he was confronted with some of his teachers that supported the Kaiser in starting the first world war. This was a wake up call for him but rather than moving away from theology, he instead rejected the easy linking of social action with the Kingdom of God (Hardy, 2005: 22). It was around 1921 and 1925 when Barth started re-reading the Reformation tradition dialectically in attempt to do away with the theology which he found flawed and replace it with a better one. In his attempt to replace the flawed theology at that time, in the 1930s he wrote the Theological Declaration of the Confessing Church which was against the German Church that supported Hitler’s policies. Having stated a few important events that happened in Karl Barth’s life, we would like to go on further in this study and describe his understanding of revelation.
After having lived through both World War I and World War II, Barth had saw how humans were flawed and how theology could be used to justify all the human flaws as if it was God’s revelation. Barth found it necessary to conceptualise what Christian revelation meant in his Church Dogmatics book. Just as he does with most of his doctrines, he divided the doctrine of revelation into three different segments, namely the triune God, the incarnation of the word and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Firstly he defined revelation as something that was disclosed before but given to be known to someone who apart from the act revealing would remain hidden (Mayer, p127). In other words, Barth asserted that God regardless of Him revealing himself to humans he still remained unknown to humans. This was then the basis of Barth’s doctrine of revelation with God (Wholly Other) being the prolegomena of Christian revelation. Going back to Barth assertion of revelation being a trinitarian event, in the sense that when God decides to reveal himself, his Word is heard and returns to him in the form of achievements among man of faith and obedience in the power of the Holy Spirit (Hart, 2000, p 60). This event according to Beach (2006, 269) is an event that happened, is happening and will happen in the future. It finds itself carrying out in history present and future. In a philosophical analogy, for revelation to occur there should be an object, subject, audience and means. Thus within the trinitarian doctrine this can be interpreted as God being the object (the Son), subject (the Father) and means (the Holy Spirit) when it comes to him revealing himself. The human being thus becomes the audience selected by God but then for them to accept or reject the revelation is entirely based on their faith and obedience. So how does such a revelation occur, you might ask. Hart (2000, 50) asserts that God in himself can be his own alter ego in both Christ and the Holy Spirit thus he is able to be part of history without him ceasing to be fully God in his true nature. As a result, this assertion cannot be clearly explained using human reasoning, thus Barth furthers his agenda of moving revelation away from Natural Theology by assert that revelation would have occurred as it is, not through epistemological or anthropological analysis in which man can say God has revealed himself to them but rather through those that have encountered him and they could or would have known what they know without them being recipients of God’s revelation. By so doing, Barth goes on to assert that humans epistemology alone is in capable of embracing God’s revelation alone. According to Hart (2000, pp. 41-42), two things made human knowing of God impossible and those two were, God’s holiness being something humans sinful and darkened minds could not contemplate as a consequence of the Fall, and secondly as a result of God not belonging to this world of objects, He becomes incomprehensible to man’s limited speech. From the previous statement we can see how Barth incorporated Immanuel Kant’s epistemology that states, God is not part of this world thus man cannot treat God as if he was part of this world. However, looking at the previous statement from the perspective of Barth’s past, we can see that he is keeping true to his word of a dialectical re-reading the Reformed tradition in attempt fix the flaws of human knowing of God which had tarnished theology by siding with policies which led to both World War I and II. Revelation thus became God self-revealing that was beyond human understanding, classification and description. In addition, Barth rejected natural theology as a reality and nature of God’s revelation because it was supra-cognitive of humans and man, himself, did not possess the power and capacity to discern about God, the world and man (Berkouwer, 1955, p. 23). Barth basis his argument on a neo-Kantians philosophy that claims that God cannot be a supra-cognitive personal reality impinging on human existence.
Moving further along to the second section of Barth’s doctrine of revelation, he understood the concept in reflection to the incarnation. So how did God reveal Himself in history could be a question that Barth asked himself when it comes to his explanation about the incarnation. Rather than Barth using historical criticism tools on the bible, he took it as the Word of God regardless of it having been read by infallible humans, it was inspired by God himself. However, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, because God was not part of this world, Him revealing Himself to man would have been limiting to man’s knowledge. As a result God incarnated as Jesus but without Himself losing control of the things that have to be revealed. He revealed Himself through the son so as to take up the human form and be known to man from the same level of knowledge in which they would understand him. This thought, Barth acquired from the Ritschlian school as they asserted that the revelation of God is visible in the historical person of Jesus (Hart, 2000, 39). The Christian church finds itself proclaiming this revelation over and over again regardless of the difference in generations from the time the person Jesus lived because revelation can never be history. Hart (2000, p 42) puts forward the notion that revelation as an event can be seen or affirmed within the sphere of that its in history but it is not of history. It is in this analogy where Barth supports his notion of rejecting natural theology. He asserts that it is through this event where both the means and the audience are lifted away from away from natural theology into an epistemic triangulation of which the third term is God Himself. Furthermore, Barth finds it important defining who Jesus is so as to not confuse him with God. He asserts that rather than Jesus being God, he is a fulfilment of the revelation and reconciliation proclaimed in the New Testament thus he is an indirect knowledge of God (Bromiley, 1979, 43). A scholar like Beach (2006, 273) could then argue that the incarnation brings about the question that man could be God, thus a human word could be a divine Word. It is at this point when fully human words are portrayed a truly God’s Word and it is then when Barth’s doctrine finds itself in Docetism. To summarise, Barth’s insertion of the incarnation of the Word was an attempt to explain how God moves freely toward humanity, when he wants to reveal Himself to his audience. He thus draws Christians away from being too Christocentric but instead be concerned with God who revealed himself in and through Christ which was incapable of being questioned by historical research (Fisher, 1988, 236).
Barth’s last and final understanding of God’s revelation was focused on the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, as mentioned earlier. The power of the Holy Spirit to Barth, dwells within one’s life and in a redemptive manner as a way to reconcile man from the Fall. Since revelation occurs as an event, to the recipient of the revelation it is only by faith and obedience in which one can fully comprehend and understand God’s revelation. Barth goes on to explain how these two aforementioned phenomena work in lengthy detail as man might misinterpret them by asserting that both of them are acquired by following a certain rules or by manipulating God. According to Hart (2000, 44), both faith and obedience are a gift given by God to the recipient for him to know God. However, this gift is not for them to keep in their possession after the revelation is complete. Furthermore, he describes it as a temporary gift that allows man to transcend into the realm of knowledge of God (Hart, 2000, 44). This Spirit according to Hardy (2005, 31), actually gives man the true life of children of God, of which Barth asserts as the absolute essential of being a man. It allows humans to live as children of God in a church which has it’s origin in Christ. It is through the Holy Spirit where man can claim Jesus name and through him can they see God revealing Himself in the immaculate birth of the Son and through the cross and resurrection of the Son. To conclude this chapter, Barth draws us to realising that revelation as an event happens as a miracle as it is out of our own understanding, but because of God’s grace to bless man with faith and obedience it becomes a miracle which gives meaning to human life that was doomed after the Fall.
In conclusion, it is clear to assert that Barth’s attempt to redefine what Christian’s understanding of revelation came at the expense of him rejecting natural theology. For that, a lot of post-modern scholars have criticised his work on the notion that God also reveals himself through nature. However, Barth asserts that not only is revelation relatively important for people in the Christian community but it is without a doubt, absolutely essential for man, of which without it man would not be able to consider themselves as man. Furthermore he uses the Bible as the word of God rather than taking it as historical critics take it and it being fallible to human deviousness. His objective is quite clear from the beginning which is to denounce human knowledge asserted to be the revelation of God in support of despicable acts by human. With the aid of Schleiermacher’s philosophy, he discerned that, religion experience is a way of experiencing the whole of life as lived as it were in the presence of the Absolute rather than it being an experience of a particular sort of reality. Barth’s doctrine of revelation correlates to Schleiermacher’s philosophy as it validates his claim that only when God wants to reveal Himself, that is when man gets to experience a revelation and conversely revelation is not an experience exhorted by man towards God. Finally, it is clear that unlike Feuerbach who had accused God for the bad things that were happening around the world during his time, Barth took an apologetic way when responding to what had gone wrong with modern theology. He managed to separate human flaws that were being attributed as God’s revelation as a result of man’s thoughts and experience with the world. To a certain degree this doctrine is applicable to South African context as it focuses mostly on how man might get to know God. With the vast amount of churches imagining within the country and their prophetic claims of having experienced a revelation, it is very important for us to use Barth’s doctrine of revelation to validate what a revelation is. On the other hand, to some degree his doctrine cannot be applicable to the South Africa we are living in. Rather than limiting revelation to special revelation alone, people tend to experience God in different ways, and it would be a shame to denounce their experience of God based on Barth’s rejection of natural theology which does not find it’s basis in the Scripture. Theologians nowadays are debating on whether the bible is the Word of God or the Word about God, thus should we limit it to be a Word of God, does it also mean that it refutes science’s empirical explanation to the world? Barth’s doctrine can therefore be contextualised within a conservative Lutheran church but not so much in the liberal churches like the African Independent Churches we have in South Africa.
Beach, JM. 2006. Revelation In Scripture: Some Comments on Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Revelation; Mid-America Journal of Theology, (17)(1). pp 267-274
Berkouwer. GC. 1955. General Revelation. Michigan. WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Bromiley, GW. 1979. Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.
Fisher, S. 1988. Revelatory Positivism?: Barth’s Earliest Theology and the Marburg School.Oxford: Oxford University,
Hardy, DW. 2005. ‘Karl Barth’ in Ford, DF. (ed). The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp 21-42.
Hart, T. 2000. ‘Revelation’ in Webster, J. (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. Cambridge: University Press. Pp 57-71.
