Genuine Questions of Church Proclamation
“Just as the reality of the Word of God in Jesus Christ bears its possibility within itself, as does also the reality of the Holy Spirit, by whom the Word of God comes to man, so too the possibility of the knowledge of God and therefore the knowability of God cannot be questioned in vacuo, or by means of a general criterion of knowledge delimiting the knowledge of God from without, but only from within this real knowledge itself. Therefore it is quite impossible to ask whether God is knowable, because this question is already decided by the only legitimate and meaningful questioning which arises in this connexion.
The only legitimate and meaningful questions in this context are: how far is God known? and how far is God knowable? These questions are legitimate and meaningful because they are genuine questions of Church proclamation, and therefore also genuine questions of dogmatics—genuine objects of its formal and material task.”
[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 6]
