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‘Thy word is truth’: the role of faith in reading scripture theologically with Karl Barth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Paul D. Molnar
Paul D. Molnar*
Affiliation:
St John's University, Queens, New York 11439, [email protected]
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Abstract

Following the thinking of Karl Barth, this article demonstrates how and why reading the Bible in faith is necessary in order to understand the truth which is and remains identical with God himself speaking to us in his Word and Spirit. After developing how faith, grace, revelation and truth are connected in Barth's theology by being determined by who God is in Jesus Christ, this article explains why Barth was essentially correct in claiming that we cannot know God truly through a study of religious experience but only through Christ himself and thus through the Spirit. I illustrate that for Barth the truth of religion simply cannot be found in the study of religion itself but only through revelation. That is why he applied the doctrine of justification by faith both to knowledge of God and to reading scripture. In light of what is then established, I conclude by briefly exploring exactly why the thinking of Paul Tillich, and three theologians who follow the general trend of Tillich's thinking (John Haught, John A. T. Robinson and S. Mark Heim), exemplify the correctness of Barth's analysis of the relation between religion and revelation, since each theologian is led to an understanding of who God is, how we reach God and how the doctrine of the Trinity should be understood that actually undermines Barth's emphasis on the fact that all knowledge of God and all doctrine should be dictated solely by who God is in Jesus Christ.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , February 2010 , pp. 70 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2010

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References

1 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, 4 vols. in 14 pts. (hereafter CD), I/2, The Doctrine of the Word of God, trans. Thomson, G. T. and Knight, Harold (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1970), p. 349Google Scholar.

2 Barth, Karl, The Word of God and the Word of Man (hereafter WGWM), trans. and foreword by Horton, Douglas (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978), ‘The Strange New World within the Bible’, pp. 28–50, at p. 33Google Scholar.

3 WGWM, p. 29.

4 Ibid., p. 32.

5 Ibid., pp. 33–4.

6 Ibid., p. 34.

7 CD II/2, p. 101.

8 CD II/1, p. 356.

9 WGWM, p. 41.

10 See e.g. CD III/3, pp. 264ff.

11 CD II/1, p. 155.

12 CD I/1, p. 404. ‘The genuine believer will not say that he came to faith from faith, but – from unbelief . . .’: CD I/2, p. 302.

13 CD II/1, p. 156.

14 CD I/1, p. 450.

15 CD IV/2, p. 350.

16 CD I/1, p. 4.

17 Ibid., p. 6.

18 WGWM, p. 41.

19 Ibid., pp. 41–2.

20 Ibid., p. 43.

21 CD I/2, p. 763.

22 Ibid., p. 365; see also CD I/1, p. 457.

23 WGWM, ‘The Righteousness of God’, pp. 9–27, at pp. 14–15.

24 Ibid., p. 16.

25 WGWM, ‘Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas’, pp. 51–96, at p. 58. Cf. also CD IV/2, p. 380, CD I/2, p. 103, and CD IV/3, pp. 44–5.

26 WGWM, pp. 58–9.

27 Ibid., p. 59.

28 Ibid., p. 82.

29 Ibid., p. 83.

30 Ibid., p. 84.

31 Ibid., p. 85.

32 Ibid., p. 88. This is the central statement of the biblical witness for Barth: ‘If there is any Christian and theological axiom, it is that Jesus Christ is risen, that He is truly risen’ CD IV/3, p. 44.

33 WGWM, pp. 86–7.

34 CD IV/3, p. 45.

35 WGWM, p. 90. Cf. also CD II/1, p. 200.

36 Ibid., p. 90.

37 Ibid., p. 91.

38 CD I/1, p. 14.

39 Ibid., pp. 118–19.

40 Ibid., pp. 452–3.

41 WGWM, p. 41.

42 Ibid., p. 40.

43 See CD IV/3, p. 670, for how this applies to Christianity and other religions.

44 WGWM, p. 40.

45 Ibid., p. 44.

46 McFague, Sallie, Models of God:Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), p. 136Google Scholar.

47 Ibid.

48 See CD I/1, pp. 400, 422.

49 See e.g. CD I/2, p. 105; II/1, pp. 319–20, and III/3, pp. 179–80.

50 See CD I/1, p. 461.

51 Ibid., p. 453.

52 Ibid., p. 454.

53 Cf. CD IV/2, p. 328.

54 McFague, Models, pp. 72–3.

55 CD I/2, p. 314.

56 McFague, Models, pp. 139–40.

57 See my ‘Myth and Reality: Analysis and Critique of Gordon Kaufman and Sallie McFague on God, Christ, and Salvation’, Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture, 1/2 (Summer 2005), pp. 23–48, at pp. 38–48.

58 McFague, Models, p. 192.

59 See CD II/2, pp. 579–83. Even after our reconciliation with God in Christ, the resisting element in us continues especially when we create world-views in order to avoid the truth of God's action in Christ on our behalf (CD IV/3, pp. 254ff.).

60 Cf. CD IV/2, p. 407.

61 CD II/2, pp. 568–9.

62 CD IV/1, p. 252.

63 CD I/1, p. 456. Cf. also CD II/1, p. 208.

64 CD III/3, pp. 249–50.

65 CD IV/1, p. 102; see also CD IV/2, p. 503.

66 CD IV/1, p. 632.

67 CD II/1, p. 159; see also p. 386.

68 CD I/2, p. 718.

69 WGWM, p. 45.

70 WGWM, p. 46. See also Barth, CD II/2, p. 580.

71 Ibid., p. 46; see also e.g. CD I/1, p. 463; I/2, p. 240; II/1, p. 149; II/2, pp. 158, 580, and IV/1, p. 729.

72 CD II/1, pp. 4ff.

73 Ibid., p. 12.

74 Ibid., p. 13.

75 Ibid., pp. 205 and 181.

76 WGWM, p. 47.

77 Ibid., p. 48.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid., pp. 48–9.

80 Ibid., pp. 49–50.

81 See CD I/2, p. 358, where Barth insists that the Christian religion can never find its justification in itself either. We must simply live by grace and for grace according to Barth (CD II/2, p. 576).

82 CD I/1, p. 22.

83 Ibid., pp. 23–4.

84 CD II/1, pp. 22–3. See also CD III/3, p. 246, where Barth links faith, obedience and prayer together in a manner similar to the way the three persons of the Trinity are perichoretically related.

85 ‘God's action is that He is gracious, and man in his action is committed to correspondence to this action. He is the image of God and His action when his own action reflects and to that extent copies the grace of God’, CD II/2, p. 576.

86 CD II/1, p. 27.

87 CD III/3, p. 150.

88 Torrance, T. F., Theology in Reconstruction (London: SCM Press, 1965), p. 163Google Scholar. Barth's thinking confirms Torrance's judgement. See CD II/1, p. 213.

89 CD I/2, p. 295.

90 Ibid., p. 348.

91 Ibid.

92 Tillich, Paul, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948), p. 57Google Scholar. Robinson, John A. T., Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963), p. 22Google Scholar, and Haught, John, What is God? How to Think about the Divine (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), pp. 14–15Google Scholar, rely on this thinking for their approaches to God.

93 For Barth ‘Revelation does not link up with a human religion which is already present and practised. It contradicts it, just as religion previously contradicted revelation’, CD I/2, p. 303.

94 Ibid., p. 377. Cf. also CD IV/2, pp. 345, 347. Barth observed: ‘If “Immanuel, with us sinners” is true, then our own deepest ground of being, whatever we think concerning it, cannot be the past revelation of God . . . ‘: CD I/1, p. 108.

95 CD IV/1, p. 249. This is why faith always means acknowledgement of God's Word and Spirit coming to us ‘absolutely from without’. See CD I/1, pp. 90, 176 and 205–8.

96 Haught, What is God?, p. 20.

97 Ibid., p. 21.

98 Ibid., p. 22.

99 Ibid., p. 24.

100 For Barth ‘man tries to grasp at truth of himself . . . a priori’ and in that way demonstrates unbelief because ‘he does not do what he has to do when the truth comes to him. He does not believe . . . If he did, he would accept a gift; but in religion he takes something for himself’ (CD I/2, p. 302).

101 Ibid., p. 315.

102 Robinson, Honest to God, p. 55.

103 Ibid., p. 60.

104 Torrance, Thomas F., God and Rationality (London: Oxford University Press, 1971; reissued Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), p. 29Google Scholar.

105 Ibid., p. 40; also p. 44. Torrance believes Robinson's thinking is merely mythological projection and as such is useless for any real understanding of God (p. 80).

106 Ibid., p. 41.

107 Ibid., p. 82.

108 Karl Barth Letters 1961–1968, ed. Jürgen Fangmeier and Hinrich Stoevesandt, trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1981), pp. 102, 116.

109 Heim, S. Mark, The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 134Google Scholar.

110 CD I/2, p. 344. Thus Barth insists that ‘Man never at all exists in himself [but] in Jesus Christ and in Him alone; as he also finds God in Jesus Christ and in Him alone’, CD II/1, p. 149. And ‘the Church must . . . see that it expects everything from Jesus Christ and from Jesus Christ everything; that He is unceasingly recognized as the way, the truth, and the life (Jn. 14.6)’, CD II/1, p. 320.

111 CD I/2, p. 345.

112 In fact Barth believes the will of God is often done better outside the church than in it, CD II/2, p. 569. And we must apply the judgement of grace acutely to ourselves and others and see ourselves in solidarity with them as we anticipate them in repentance and hope and live by faith and grace, CD I/2, pp. 327–8.

113 CD IV/3, p. 91.

114 Heim, Depth of Riches, p. 137.

115 Ibid., p. 268.

116 CD II/1, p. 367.

117 Ibid., p. 361.

118 Heim, Depth of Riches, p. 127.

119 Ibid., p. 233.

120 Ibid., pp. 126–7.

121 Ibid., p. 229.

122 CD II/1, p. 319.

123 CD IV/2, p. 406.