Читать книгу God In Action - Karl Barth - Страница 7
ОглавлениеWE CANNOT speak of revelation without being made immediately aware of two other concepts which are closely related to it. They are the concepts of testimony and confession. We would not know of revelation if it did not come to us by way of testimony concerning it. I mean by this the word and the spirit of the apostles and prophets as they live in the Holy Scriptures. The Church is founded on revelation through the medium of the testimony of those who have heard and seen it. In faith we can have knowledge of it, and speak of it for the very reason that this testimony exists. To receive and accept revelation means, then, to receive and accept this testimony. And this in turn constitutes confession. We cannot speak of revelation as we speak of the results of philosophic reflections on ourselves and on the presuppositions of our existence, or as we speak of discoveries in the spheres of nature and history. We cannot maintain its reality and truth as if we had discovered it, and as if we could establish its validity. We can only receive, accept, and acknowledge it on the ground of the testimony concerning it which has created the Church, and still preserves it, and in which it, namely, revelation, meets us in its own power, credibility, and authority.
Let me elucidate in a parable the relation of the three concepts of revelation, testimony, and confession; and chiefly the reality and truth of what we are to understand by revelation.
On the battlefield (namely, not in a study, nor on a stage but on the battlefield of human life) it has happened (it has indubitably and irrevocably happened with the complete, once-for-all singularity [Einmaligkeit] and with the whole gravity of a factual event) that the enemy (the enemy, the other one, not man himself but his opponent, an adversary who is determined to engage man) with overwhelming superiority (the event is caused by his intention and disposition and not by man’s) has gone into action (we are not asked if and how we intend to come to grips with him, for the engagement is in full swing). This event is God’s revelation to man; and whoever fails to understand it in this manner does not know what he is saying when he takes the word revelation on his lips.
But let us continue the parable. From the troop which occupies the front line (it is not a group of poets and thinkers, nor are they men who have time and leisure to meditate on the things of man, nor are they men engaged with their own deeds and sufferings; rather, they are fighting men who are compelled to face this enemy) comes the report (not a theoretical system, nor an esthetic appreciation, nor a work program but a hasty and urgent report) of the fact of this attack (not of the well-being or ill-being of the fighting men, nor of the existence and nature of the enemy but simply of the fact: we have been attacked) to reenforcements who are standing in readiness immediately behind the front line (not to a group of journalists or other battlefield loafers but to a troop not unlike the men of the first line which is destined to engage the enemy and appointed to give battle). The group whom the enemy has already attacked are the prophets and apostles; and their report to the other group which is standing behind the front line prepared to reenforce them is the Holy Scripture. Whoever fails to understand these men and this book in such a manner does not have a truly realistic understanding of them.
We bring the parable to a close. The arrival of their report is to those standing in the rear a quite self-evident signal (a discussion of the practical importance of this report is quite excluded) of the necessity (not of a possibility but of the necessity which finds expression in immediate and definite commands) to arise, take up arms, form into line, and march to the front (all this the more quickly and energetically, the more overwhelming the superiority of the attacking enemy and the greater the danger which is threatening from the front line.)
These reenforcements whom the report from the front line has called up is the Church which hears the Holy Scripture. The moment of the call, and thus of decision, resolution, command, and obedience is the moment in which we stand: the moment of confession. We are called to hasten to the place where the prophets and apostles are making their stand. They are standing face to face with the coming GOD. They call us to their side; not for their own sake but for the sake of God. The troop which has heard them and sets out in their direction is the Church, the confessing Church. A Church which has an understanding of its existence and nature different from the one here indicated would be an uninteresting affair.
In making use of this parable, I do not lay claim to originality. It is possible to speak in an original manner on every subject in the whole wide world except this one. Of this subject it is possible only to speak faithfully, i.e., exegetically. With what I have said, I merely have tried to restate how the prophets and apostles, how the Church fathers and reformers understood the testimony of the Bible, and how we ourselves must understand the Church and the confession, and thus also ourselves, if we are to remain in line with them.
For a beginning we shall pass up what will need to be said concerning the concepts of testimony and confession, and proceed to fix some propositions which have validity if, in conformity with prophets and apostles, revelation is understood to be an event of the free and sovereign activity of God toward man.
What will knowledge of revelation mean then? Four points will be seen to be fundamental.
1. Knowledge of revelation does not always begin with clarity. It may increase in clarity; it should do so. It may, however, diminish also in clarity. But under all circumstances, it begins with certitude. Either God has spoken or He has not spoken. If He has spoken, He has done so in such a manner that it is impossible not to heed Him. Among others, the question of His existence and nature are then decided and can be answered only a posteriori. Doubt and despair, human unbelief, and even a sea of uncertainties on our part, will not be able to change the certitude of His presence. Revelation is this divine presence. Innumerable human questions may arise in the face of this divine presence. But every one is related to the answer which has already been given in the revelation of His presence. Certitude has the first and last word, not as our certitude but as the certitude of God.
2. Knowledge of revelation may be interrupted. It may even cease altogether. It may be bartered away for false knowledge and vain revelation. But, wherever it takes place, it possesses the character of singularity (Einmaligkeit). As a man can have only one father; as he is able to look at one time with his eyes into the eyes of only one other man; as he can hear with his two ears the word of only one man at one and the same time; as he is born only once and dies but once—so he can believe and know only one revelation. It is quite possible to place alongside each other, and compare a multiplicity of religions, but not a multiplicity of revelations. Whoever says revelation says one single revelation which has happened once and for all, irrevocably and unrepeatedly. As certainly as God is one. Possibility vanishes before His reality, and probability disappears before His truth. Before His face, evasion, either to the right or to the left, is impossible. In His presence there is no room left for choice, but only for decision, and always and only for decision.
3. Knowledge of revelation may be surrounded and accompanied by a rich variety of human fate. It may bring with it the profoundest external and inward experiences and call forth heroic deeds in a man. It may lift to mountain tops of human joy and plunge into an abyss of human sorrow. For revelation concerns itself with man, and every one of these things is a part of human life. But there remains—no, in the knowledge of revelation alone there emerges and comes to the surface the world-wide difference existing between, and separating, God and man.
It is man in his totality whom God meets in His revelation. They who would mix and confuse God and man, either in understanding man to be himself God or in looking upon God as the profoundest part of man’s nature or as man’s highest ideal, certainly never have seen that battlefield, nor have they heard the report from the battlefield of prophets and apostles. He who understands the meeting of God and man which takes place in revelation to be a union or fusion of these two principals of revelation, must be very much of a stranger in our world, a very untroubled spectator of our troubled affairs; or he must be passionately enamored with his own fate, activity, and suffering, and he must have heard little or nothing of the action of the opponent who confronts in his sovereign superiority man’s fate and existence. There is not another moment in time, not another place in all the world, which offers less opportunity for the temptation of mixing and fusing man and God than where God and man really find each other: in God’s revelation.
4. Knowledge of revelation can and must mean, then, a knowledge of the far away, strange, and holy God. It prohibits the useless and dangerous thought that, in meeting God, man can appear and cooperate as God’s partner, as if he were filled and endowed with a capacity and good will for God. Knowledge of revelation means always an acknowledgement of the miracle by reason of which this meeting takes place. Their meeting is acknowledged to be occasioned by God’s grace, mercy, and condescension. These very words, however, distinctly affirm revelation to be a real relation between God and man, a relation the foundation of which is laid in Him from whom it possesses and derives its strength and permanence. It means that it is not founded on the ambiguous truth of our human nature, reason, or love. It is founded, however, on the free decision of the eternal and unchangeable God. The man to whom this relation still persists to be a question, or the man who would dare to deny it, would not have before his eyes God’s attack, divine action. Knowledge of revelation does not mean an abstract knowledge of a God confronting an abstract man. Rather, it is a concrete knowledge of the God who has sought man and meets him in his concrete situation and finds him there. Revelation is a concrete knowledge of God and man in the event brought about by the initiative of a sovereign God. This is what constitutes the glory of God: where the infinite difference between God and man becomes manifest, there indeed it becomes manifest also that man belongs to God not because he is capable of God, not because he has sought and found him, but because it is God’s gracious will to make man His own.
We have spoken of revelation. We could not possibly speak of it without anticipating the decisive factors in the problem of the nature and content of revelation. Why that certitude? Why that singularity (Einmaligkeit)? Why the unheard-of separation and relation between God and man which revelation effects? For the reason that revelation—that which came to prophets and apostles as revelation—is nothing less than God Himself. For this reason it is a mystery, i.e., a reality the possibility of which resides absolutely within itself; and therefore, also, we shall never, no, not in all eternity, be able to understand, derive, and substantiate it except out of itself. God is of and through Himself. We, likewise, are able to meditate on revelation only if our thinking begins with revelation when it has spoken for itself. And, therefore, it is authority, i.e., it is a truth which cannot be measured by the rule of any other truth beside it, however profound and valid that truth may appear to be. Rather, it is a truth which decides, and continues to decide what may be true. It is a truth then with whose acknowledgment every truth must make its beginning; and without its acknowledgment even profoundest truth is deception and a lie. And for the reason that revelation is God Himself, it is the court of last appeal for man—grace to him who accepts its verdict of condemnation as being God’s right, condemnation to him who will not receive this grace, but who asserts, and insists upon, his rights as a man in opposition to it.
Because revelation is God Himself! Twice the Christian Church was compelled to contend for the victory of this knowledge. The first time it was in the fourth century when the doctrine of the Trinity was at stake, i.e., the acknowledgment of the essential deity of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. In consummating this acknowledgment in a dogma, the Church gave expression to this: exactly in believing revelation, the Church believes God Himself; and she believes God Himself by believing revelation. This is what the Subordination and Modalist antitrinitarians of every age have never understood and never will understand. It was well and necessary that the Church did not permit itself to be led into error by their arguments.
The second battle for this same truth was fought in the sixteenth century, when the Reformation doctrine of free grace was at stake. The reformers were concerned about a right understanding of the justification of the sinner. They contended that it was an act in which the gift which is bestowed on the sinner is identical with the Giver of the gift, with His feelings, disposition, and dealings with that man, with the deed of God in which He gives and grants Himself freely to us: Immanuel. Jesus Christ is and remains our only justification; therefore, it can be ours only by faith in Him. This is what medieval Roman Catholicism did not yet understand and what modernistic Protestantism of every hue and shade proceeded and persists to forget. The Reformation doctrine, in its Lutheran as well as in its Calvinistic form, says with the same simplicity as did the Council of Nicæa: God Himself is the content of His revelation.
It is quite possible that the battle has entered its third stage today. Throughout the world, the Church is concerned today with the problem of the secularization of the modern man. It would perhaps be more profitable if the Church were at least to begin to become concerned with the problem of its own secularization. Secularism surely reigns where interest in divine revelation has been lost or bartered away for the interests of man. Is it unjust to say that knowledge of divine revelation has been forgotten where revelation is taken to be a change, an improvement, a perhaps very arbitrarily devised changed and improvement of man? Where it has been forgotton that revelation is God Himself? Where, therefore, awareness of its mystery, authority, and judgment has been lost? Where its authority and its singularity are neglected? Where awareness of the chasm between God and man, and therefore also the bridge which unites them, has been lost sight of? Is the Church surprised that it has little or nothing to say to the modern man? Continuing on this path, it will have increasingly less to say to him. Perhaps it is high time and a matter of supreme importance for the Church to take up in all seriousness the battle for the old truth, the battle of Nicæa and of the Reformers—God’s revelation is God Himself, the one, ever-present, eternal, and living God.
But whatever may be our judgment of the demands of the hour, this is the meaning, content, and dynamic of the revelation which met the biblical prophets and apostles: God Himself is here in the fact that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are here. He is with us as we are, yes, He is Himself what we are. He has assumed our nature; He has made our sin His own, and He has made our death His. To Him who is endowed with the fulness of the divine majesty, nothing that is human is foreign. He took upon Himself our fate, our godlessness, yea, the torture of our hell. Our deepest misery is His misery also. Yes, exactly in the depths of our misery He intercedes for us, and substitutes Himself for us, warding off the wages justly due us and suffering and making restitution what we could not suffer and where we could not make restitution. He Himself, Jesus Christ, who has suffered the death of a sinner and sits at the right hand of the Father, is our advocate. He Himself, the Holy Spirit, who with groanings that cannot be uttered, makes intercession for us who do not know what we should pray. This is what revelation means, this is its content and dynamic: Reconciliation has been made and accomplished. Reconciliation is not a truth which revelation makes known to us; reconciliation is the truth of God Himself who grants Himself freely to us in His revelation. God, who is the mighty, holy, and eternal God, gave Himself to us, who are so impotent, so unholy, and mortal. Revelation is reconciliation, as certainly as it is God Himself: God with us; God beside us, and chiefly and decisively, God for us.
Whatever else it may be possible to say about that nature and content of revelation is dependent on this fact. Call it an act of the divine sovereignty by which God declares, enforces, and maintains Himself to be the Creator of a man who, though he has abused and lost his freedom, nevertheless belongs to Him; the Creator of a world which, though it has become an enigma to this man, belongs to God, nevertheless. Call revelation an act of forgiveness in which God accepts this man in spite of his sin as one who is right for Him and so calls him His child out of pure mercy, i.e., for the sake of his divine righteousness. Call it an act of sanctification in which God gives man His commandment and calls him to Himself, lays claim to him for Himself, and dignifies him who is without capacity and good-will for God, that he might serve Him, live and suffer for Him, and love and praise Him. Call it an act of promise by which God gives to this man and to his world a hope and an outlook and expectation of His coming reign and kingdom, of redemption, joy, and peace in His kingdom, in which God, will wipe away all tears from their eyes and death shall be no more, neither mourning, nor crying, nor pain: for the first things are passed away.
None of these things are wanting in the revelation which has come to the prophets and apostles. They were right in giving it all these names and definitions. They met in it the sovereign will of the Creator, the Reconciler, and of the Redeemer. But let us not forget that they were met first and foremost with the sovereign will of God the Reconciler; first and foremost with Jesus Christ, the Word of God which has come to sinners; and first and foremost with the Holy Spirit through whom sinners are called to repentance. The second article of the Creed does not occupy its central place by sheer accident. Primarily and chiefly, it must be accepted as valid truth: God for us! Not something divine, not something akin to God, or something coming from God. No, God Himself. Since it has pleased God to grant us nothing less than Himself, we are compelled to confess: So great must be our misery that nothing less than God Himself was able to help us. Or, so great is God’s love for us that He refused to give us anything less than Himself. We need to thank Him that He did just what He did. This is revelation: the event of God’s sovereign initiative. That it is an event, we are told by the biblical witnesses. If they are right in what they report, then it is indeed the event of all events. Descartes is wrong, then, when he says: Cogito, ergo sum. For by the reason of this revelation, we are less certain of our own existence than of God’s existence for us.
