Barth’s Theological Ontology of Holy Scripture

By Alfred H. Yuen and John Webster

"I was and I am an ordinary theologian, who does not have the Word of God at his disposal, but, at best, a 'Doctrine of the Word of God,'" writes Karl Barth in the preface of Die christliche Dogmatik im Emtwurf. Properly appreciating the complex career of Barth's characterization of what Scripture is theologically can open up constructive lines of inquiry regarding his self-description as a theologian and reader of the Bible. By mining Barth's published and posthumous theological and exegetical writings and sermons, both well-known materials and understudied writings such as the significant "Das Schriftprinzip der reformierten Kirche" lecture, Alfred H. Yuen offers a unique reading of Barth's thoughts on the person and work of the biblical writers by mapping his theological career as a university student, a pastor, a writer, a young professor, and, above all, a "child of God" (CD I/1, 464-65).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: May 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630873295

Alfred H. Yuen

Alfred H. Yuen was a postdoctoral research scholar at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, from 2012 to 2013. He undertook his PhD at King's College, Aberdeen, under Professor John Webster.

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Barth’s Theological Ontology of Holy Scripture

Alfred H. Yuen

Foreword by


John Webster

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BARTH’S THEOLOGICAL ONTOLOGY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

Princeton Theological Monograph Series 211

Copyright © 2014 Alfred H. Yuen. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Pickwick Publications

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ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-911-5

eISBN 13: 978-1-63087-329-8

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Yuen, Alfred H.

Barth’s theological ontology of Holy Scripture / Alfred H. Yuen ; foreword by John Webster.

xii + 186 pp. ; cm. —Includes bibliographical references and index.

Princeton Theological Monograph Series 211

ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-911-5

1. Barth, Karl, 1886–1968. 2. Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Webster, J. B. (John Bainbridge), 1955–. II. Title. III. Series.

BS511.3 .Y83 2014

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Princeton Theological Monograph Series

K. C. Hanson, Charles M. Collier, D. Christopher Spinks, and Robin Parry, Series Editors

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Foreword

It is one of the curiosities of the reception of Barth’s theology that, though he is commonly acclaimed as a theologian of the Word, relatively little attention has been devoted to his doctrine of Holy Scripture. There have been studies of aspects of his exegesis and his hermeneutics, of his attitudes to the methods of historical criticism, and of the way in which is dogmatic thought is shaped by biblical narrative. But what Barth had to say about the nature of Scripture remains under-explored, especially in English-language scholarship, where the only full-dress treatment of the theme—Klass Runia’s Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Holy Scripture—is ill-informed and deeply unsympathetic. A number of explanations for the neglect might be adduced: lack of interest in bibliology on the part of contemporary mainstream Protestant theologians; palpable hostility towards Barth’s teaching about the nature of Scripture on the part of a vocal adherents of a dominant strand of confessional Reformed theology, who judge him a treacherous occasionalist who refuses to identify Scripture and Word of God; the gravitation of Barth’s more sympathetic readers to other elements of his theology of revelation, above all its Christological principles. Barth himself, of course, shares some of the responsibility for steering readers away from the topic. Like some of his nineteenth century forebears, he worried that a doctrine of Scripture, and especially of biblical inspiration, risked collapsing the free presence and activity of divine speech into an inert textual deposit, and he deployed the idea of Scripture as witness to revelation as a way of avoiding the peril.

Yet Barth’s unease with one strand of the Reformed tradition’s varied teaching on the nature of the Bible—a strand which he did not, perhaps, understand as fully as he should—ought not to make readers inattentive to the many things which he had to say in the topic, especially in his earlier writings. As Barth built up his interpretation of the particular genius of Reformed Christianity in the 1920s, he lighted upon a number of its differentia: its insistence that the telos of salvation is moral renewal; its confessional mobility; and its dedication to the Scripture principle, to which this study gives its attention. Its core proposal—that, by virtue of the Holy Spirit’s action, both the scriptural writings and their readers have their ontological centre in divine self-communication—is laid out by an attentive study of representative writings, pastoral and theological, from Barth’s student days to the first volume of the Church Dogmatics. It possesses the qualities Barth himself looked for in study of theologians from the past: attentiveness, sympathy, willingness to follow another’s questions and answers, a sense of the weightiness of the matter by which another’s mind and spirit are engaged. It is an invitation to consider a grand theme in a grand thinker.

John Webster

University of St. Andrews

Abbreviations

Introduction

[I]t is characteristic of what is said and intended and denoted in the Bible, again in the sense of those who said it, that if it is to reveal and establish itself at all as substance and object, it must do so of itself. How can it be otherwise, when what is said is God’s revelation, the lordship of the triune God in His Word by the Holy Ghost? To what is said—and even as they say it, and the biblical witnesses themselves attest it—there belongs a sovereign freedom in fact of both speaker and hearer alike. The fact that it can be said and heard does not mean that it is put at the power and disposal of those who say and hear it. What it does mean is that as it is said and heard by them it can make itself said and heard. It is only by revelation that revelation can be spoken in the Bible and that it can be heard as the real substance of the Bible. If it is to be witness at all, and to be apprehended as such, the biblical witness must itself be attested by what it attests. . . . In fact of it, the unfortunate possibility that the matter of which the word speaks may be alien to us does not excuse us. Nor does it permit us, instead of proceeding from the substance of the word, to go first to the word, i.e., to the humanity of the speakers as such. But if that is the case, we obviously not excused or permitted by the mystery which is the obvious source of this fatal possibility: the mystery of the sovereign freedom of the substance. . . . We have to know the mystery of the substance if we are really to meet it, if we are really to be open and ready, really to give ourselves to it, when we are told it, that it may really meet us as the substance. And when it is a matter of understanding, the knowledge of this mystery will create in us a peculiar fear and reserve which is not at all usual to us. We will then know that in the face of this subject-matter there can be no question of our achieving, as we do in others, the confident approach which masters and subdues the matter. It is rather a question of our being gripped by the subject-matter—not gripped physically, not making an experience of it and the like, although (ironically) that can happen—but really gripped, so that it is only as those who are mastered by the subject-matter, who are subdued by it, that we can investigate the humanity of the word by which it is told us.¹

Thus Karl Barth in the second part-volume of the Church Dogmatics, one that, which first saw the light of day as university lectures at Basel, was completed shortly after his Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1937.

Arguably, it is a substantial statement about the nature of Scripture: what Scripture is in virtue of its employment² by the triune God in His Word by the Holy Ghost. If Barth’s pneumatological, bibliological reference informs his characterization of Scripture, I suggest that the significance of the reference has been somewhat overlooked in a number of recent readings on his view of Scripture. In his view of Scripture, Barth understood the Spirit as unbound,³ external,⁴ and necessary⁵ to the regeneration of the biblical witnesses as peccatores iusti in the consequence of the asymmetry,⁶ externality, and unidirectionality of their hidden, new person to the old.⁷ Consequently, with respect to God’s unbound, pure deity in his relation to the biblical witnesses, if Scripture is wholly gratuitous—unnecessary—to his entire being, then Scripture and the reading church are therefore—contingent—upon his unbound action to which they are entirely bound. I suggest that Barth’s bibliological notion of contingence considers God’s transcendence in God’s immanence: the ontological weight in Barth’s well-known talk of God’s lordship is on Scripture and theology, and on creation—but not on God. As Barth wrote, God is Lord of the wording of His Word. He is not bound to it but it to Him. He has free control over the wording of Holy Scripture. He can use it or not use it. He can use it in this way or in that way.⁸ My account of Barth’s reference to the Spirit’s scriptural self-presence keeps in view the emphasis on the Spirit’s deity as well as the Spirit’s oneness in being with the Father and Son. It goes without saying, though it should be said for clarity, that in my reading I do neither hold nor argue that Barth is infallible. Instead, my intention is quite simply a plausible and self-delimited account of his view of Scripture. In sum, whether or not Barth’s view of the Spirit is valid—an important question that far exceeds the modest scope of my reading—my reading of Barth’s pneumatological reference suggests Barth’s arguably crucial, bibliological commitment to a key principle: "opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa."⁹

If this reading of Barth’s bibliological emphasis on the pure deity of God is plausible, I suggest, for instance, that Barth’s characterization of God’s relation to Scripture and the church has less to do with what R.W. Jenson describes as Barth’s Spirit-avoidance¹⁰ or what R.D. Williams calls the linear view of revelation.¹¹ Jenson complains that Barth (apparently) relegates the Spirit from a full agent to an impersonal power, while Williams speaks of Barth’s (alleged) subordination of the Spirit to the Father and the Son. Their readings tend to reduce Barth’s account of God’s saving economy to mere epistemological issues. And this sort of tendency in reading Barth risks giving the impressions, for instance, that God is vulnerable to churchly or creaturely transference; that human ideas about God can be read back into the being and action of God; and that the Spirit lacks genuine freedom in the Godhead, and particularly in relation to the Word. But I suggest in my reading of Barth that these impressions are distortions of his convictions about God; about God’s relation to Scripture and to the church; and about the deity and agency of the Spirit of the triune God. As Barth wrote on the relation between the Spirit and Scripture in the reception of the latter by virtue of the former as the ends and means of the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ:

Man remains man, the man who can deceive himself and others; the sign remain a sign, which may fade again and disappear. But the Holy Spirit remains the Holy Spirit wholly and utterly the Spirit of promise. Even and especially the child of God in the New Testament sense will never for a moment or in any regard cease to confess: I believe that I cannot of my own reason or power believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him. God remains the Lord even and precisely when He fills us. No other intercedes with Him on our behalf except Himself. In thy light we see light (Ps.

36

.

9

). The deity of the Holy Spirit is thus demanded. The essentiality, the directness of the work of the Holy Spirit is demanded.¹²

Suppose that what concerns Jenson and Williams is Barth’s account of the Spirit’s freedom in the Godhead, especially in relation to the Word. Barth’s writings on Scripture, however, do not attest the concern.¹³ On the contrary, I suggest that Barth’s aforesaid view on Scripture is arguably informed by his conviction about the Spirit’s freedom in relation to the Word, the Spirit’s freedom as characteristic of the freedom and action of the triune God.

Although I argue that Barth’s view of Scripture is pneumatologically informed in the terms of his commitment to the logical priority of the belief in God’s indivisible, immanence and transcendence, I do not pretend that my self-consciously limited, focused reading of Barth’s concept of Scripture can address every legitimate question concerning his pneumatology and doctrine of God (and their implication in theological anthropology of the reader, theology of interpretation, and so on)—neither is that the purpose or objective of the book. More closely, my reading does not pretend to do anymore than scratching the surface of the relation between Scripture and Spirit in Barth’s bibliological writings. Succinctly put, it is not primarily a reading of Barth’s pneumatology or concept of interpretation: it is rather a reading of Barth’s theological concept of Scripture—what Scripture is in terms of its content, nature, and ends by virtue of the activity of the triune God. Occasionally, this focus on Barth’s concept of Scripture would help lead us to, I wish to show, Barth’s teachings about the Spirit and about God. Once again, however, the thesis is about Barth’s view of Scripture, not about his pneumatology in any depth or as a whole: I intend simply to indicate Barth’s reference to the Spirit as a significant and visible feature of the shape of his concept of Scripture. My language concerning his concepts of divine illumination, inspiration, and election, for instance, serves none other than occasionally to highlight just this indication; it does not pretend to offer a full account or exhaustive definition of the concepts. And the same rule of delimitation applies to my language of externality, creation, creature, reader, theological anthropology, and so on. Moreover, neither is my reading to offer, in addition to exposition of Barth’s above-mentioned view of Scripture, any extensive commentary on, or in-depth analysis of, Barth’s biblical exposition (or related scriptural texts), reading of European intellectual history, church history, history of dogma, the history of the doctrine of Scripture, or the history of theological and biblical interpretation. In short: as I sketch a picture of Barth’s concept of Scripture, my occasional indication of this significant reference to the Spirit is at best preliminary—and no more.

In thesis form: Barth was convinced that Holy Scripture is outside of itself—it is what it is, only by virtue of the saving action of the triune God. Generally put, this formal sounding language of divine action is simply a way of drawing out the theological force of Barth’s characterization of the Spirit’s unidirectional, gracious employment of Scripture as canonical witness to God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ.¹⁴ Instead of orienting to the Spirit’s use of Scripture through a kind of hermeneutical immediacy,¹⁵ Barth wrote, I was and I am an ordinary theologian, who does not have the Word of God at his disposal, but, at best, a ‘Doctrine of the Word of God’.¹⁶ Conversely, if Barth resists any kind of hermeneutical immediacy, his resistance, I suggest, stems from his belief in God as absolute sovereign over the human person, unbound sovereignty and majesty that are irreducible to human subjects and their self-theorization—including Scripture’s own. More closely, Barth’s belief suggests that if God’s unbound giving of the proper person has a logical priority in proper scripture-reading, our characterization of the proper reader demands more than mere readerly discipline or merely a different way of reading Scripture as Holy Scripture.¹⁷ By indicating the consequence of the contingence and necessity of the Spirit’s gift of person in the formation, reception, and reading of the biblical canon, Barth could speak confidently and self-critically of a logical priority of the history and objectivity of revelation and reconciliation in biblical and theological studies. And this needs a bit of elaboration.

Put slightly differently, if by the miracle of regeneration Scripture points its centre radically away from itself to Christ, it is by the Spirit’s electing, sanctifying activity that the unidirectional, unbound relation of his life-giving activity to what Scripture is comes to readerly attention.¹⁸ Barth’s construal of the proper reader, I suggest, is a corollary of his pneumatological construal of what Scripture is by God’s saving act. If Barth stressed that neither Scripture nor the reader is absolute in relation to God,¹⁹ and resisted any direct identification of providentia Dei with confusio hominem, the sort of theological conviction that had made him a life-long stranger to what he called absolutism of the human subjecthood,²⁰ it was not because he was insensitive to the concerns for humanity raised especially in European intellectual history since the Renaissance and by the critics of ontotheology in the church. If he stressed God’s absolute freedom, it was rather because he had deeply understood those concerns from the earliest days of his theological career. He was convinced that even in a narcissistic and violent world—in and outside the church—the church, in its intellectual and practical life, must still preach and teach the pure gospel as God’s mercy and freedom in complete, concrete victory over sin; the church can do so, he stressed, only by virtue of the mystery²¹ of God’s grace and command in concreto. In the very least Scripture’s primacy of God’s gracious action meant for Barth a logical priority of the Spirit’s gift of the person in the biblical witness and the reader, and their absent self-entitlement to the gift without exception. If Barth’s critics believed that he taught an abstract, transcendent God who is not concerned with the real men (‘God is all, man is nothing!’), abstract eschatological waiting, without significance for the present, and the equally abstract church, all these ideas, Barth declared, were not in my head.²²

From the logical priority of the Spirit’s giving of the concrete gift of person, it follows that essential to the church’s scriptural orientation, Barth argued, is a logical priority of a proper characterization of the person of the biblical writers and their readers over epistemic and methodological concerns. It, moreover, follows that, Barth stressed, for instance, human construal of God and humanity—including the Bible’s own—is not to be read back into the relation itself, for if the Spirit is free to employ or reject the biblical witnesses, his election of them is his unqualified, sovereign freedom absolutely. If Barth resisted any sort of coinherence of Bible and church²³ or divine speech, the scriptural text and authorized interpretation of the sacred text,²⁴ it was in significant part because his self-described identification with the Reformed Scripture Principle, we suggest, had afforded him an immense doctrinal resource to his enduring pneumatological convictions about Scripture.²⁵ If this reading of the career of his sermons, biblical expositions, and theological writings is plausible, it also reinforces our position on the significance of Barth’s self-described Reformed identity as a biblical theologian²⁶ and the related weight of biblical exegesis in his theological convictions and their maturation.

My account of Barth’s concept of the Bible comes to expression here in a study of what is called Barth’s theological ontology of Holy Scripture. Put in its plainest terms, what follows is a sustained argument for certain key aspects of the above-mentioned pneumatological reference in Barth’s theological characterization of the person and work of the biblical witnesses as peccatores iusti. It is not intended as a simple recommendation of Barth’s view of Scripture, or as a comprehensive critique of many theological issues raised in it. Rather, it is a straightforward textual-commentarial account of his more explicitly bibliological material whose adequacy, integrity, and persuasiveness I leave to the judgement of the readers—in the hope that this study may open up lines of enquiry serviceable in their own constructive work.

As a theological sketch, moreover, it does not seek or claim to address many issues that, each in its intricacy and integrity, deserves to be considered in a fuller account than what is clearly beyond the specific scope and purpose of this study. In most general terms, such issues include the relation between, for instance, philosophy and theology, metaphysics and hermeneutics, canon and tradition, or biblical and theological studies. Likewise, the sketch is self-consciously delimited in what it attempts to say about the relation of Christian bibliology to the doctrines of God and revelation, christology and pneumatology, along with their extensions: anthropology, ecclesiology, the doctrines of election, reconciliation, sanctification, and so on. Its occasional attempts only scarcely scratch the surface of these concepts and doctrines at best,