Barth on Revelation

Trevor Hart has a helpful article on Barth�s view of revelation in the Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. First, Hart sketches the neo-Kantian philosophical and theological context for Barth�s work. For Barth, nineteenth-century �consciousness theology,�Ethe attempt to ground theology in some feature of human experience or knowledge, was a disastrous movement of which Feuerbach was the logical outcome.

The stages of this development are these: According to Kant, knowledge exists where the mind imposes categories on the data provided by sensible experience; because there is no sensible data concerning God, God is not properly an object of knowledge, but only an object of faith, a disposition in the moral sphere of practical reason. Kant thus provided the background for the common opposition in nineteenth-century of head knowledge and heart religion. Accepting the Kantian strictures on theology, Schleiermacher traced religion to �the capacity for what he describes as a �sense of absolute dependence�Eor, more theologically, �God-consciousness.�� All men are �fitted for an encounter with Infinity,�Eand religious experience extends to the whole of experience: �religious experience�E.is a way of experiencing the whole of life as lived, as it were, in the presence of the Absolute.�E Jesus �modifies�Ethis universal experience, but Schleiermacher�s theology has little room for revelation in the sense of a �a particular and peculiar manifestation which is in some sense additional to, inexplicable in terms of, and even an interruption of, the ordinary [�natural�] sources and patterns of our knowing.�E What is �original�Ein revelation is �nonetheless a perfectly �natural�Ephenomenon insofar as it derives from the God-consciousness proper to human nature.�E The Ritschlian school that dominated the world of Barth�s teachers denied that Christianity could be rooted in any sort of general human capacity, insisting instead on the particular and historical revelation of God in Jesus. But in effect they left decisions about the character of this revelation in the hands of scholars who examined the gospels to determine what phenomena of Jesus�Elife could be seen as revelatory. Against all this, Barth insisted that the faith and experience of the Christian is not a source for theology but response to a divine initiative of revelation.

Revelation is, for Barth, a miracle, and that is true for two reasons. First, because of the Fall man is incapable of receiving the revelation of God, and since the Fall meant estrangement and alienation from God, revelation is just another side of reconciliation and atonement (not merely the announcement of a reconciliation taking place somewhere else). But, second, revelation is miraculous because, even discounting the issue of sin, God is �wholly other than the creature and confronts it as such in absolute mystery.�E God is not an phenomenon in the world of objects (though He makes Himself so in the incarnation). Man thus has no natural capacity for knowledge of God. If man is to know God, God must act to reveal Himself.

It�s here that the serious problems begin, though Hart does not identify them as problems. First, he says that �while this alleged impossibility has profound implications for a theological anthropology it is not itself rooted in any general anthropological considerations.�E But surely it must be rooted in some sort of anthropological considerations. What Barth is denying is that he can locate some �religious faculty�Ewithin man that revelation can latch onto �Esome receiving mechanism that can pick up the signals of revelation. The receiving mechanism (faith) is concreated with the revelation itself. Yet, even this assumes a prior anthropology, for it assumes that man is the sort of creature in whom God can produce this sort of response (unless Barth is willing to say that God can or would create faith in a chimp or a dung beetle).

Second, Barth (on Hart�s reading, and on mine) consistently speaks of the lack of any �natural�Epotentialities for revelation: Hart wriutes that for Barth �the characteristic of Christian faith is precisely to look away from itself and from its own natural capacities, and to consider instead the capacities and possibilities of the God who raised Jesus from the dead and who has given himself to be known to us.�E Of course, this is true in one sense; faith is precisely looking to God. But to speak of �natural capacities�Eas if they existed in their own right is wholly foreign to the biblical creationist outlook. (Hart at one point reports that Barth denies that faith is �an inherent human possibility or capacity�E but of course, because there are no �inherent�Ehuman possibilities.) For I have no �natural�Ecapacities; my capacity for thought and feeling is as much gift as my capacity for faith. David Bentley Hart is on the right track when he emphasizes (following Gregory of Nyssa) that we are �a vessel endlessly expanding as it receives what flows into it inexhaustibly,�Eso that we become �ever more capacious and receptive�Eof God.

Finally, Hart suggests that revelation for Barth occurs in history but is not of history: �No satisfactory account can be given of its possibility in purely human or historical terms.�E But again, of what CAN it be said that we give an account in purely human and historical terms? Is anything merely human and historical? Is not God coinvolved in every event of the creation? This, I think, is the heart of Barth�s view of Scripture, and the source of all the problems of his views.

Hart discusses the Trinitarian framework of Barth�s understanding of revelation, the relation of revelation to reconciliation, the event-character of revelation. The whole article provides a neat summary of the insight and the profound pitfalls of Barth�s doctrine of revelation.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, October 22, 2004 at 11:28 PM

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