A Joyful Action

“There is one final point. The knowledge of God as participation in the veracity of the revelation of God is a work of gratitude. But this means that it cannot take place except in joyfulness. There can be no acknowledgement of the revelation of God unless we ourselves are involved. But, involved in this way, we are placed strictly under the rule of the object and become obedient. This obedience, however, can only mean that we are ourselves requisitioned to be doers of this work. If the revelation reaches us, if it becomes for us the necessary basis of our knowledge, this does, of course, mean that it approaches us from without, but it also means—how else can it reach us?—that it does actually come to us and therefor into us. It does not cease to transcend us, but we become immanent to it, so that obedience to it is our free will.

But because God remains transcendent to us even in His revelation, the subjectivity of our acknowledgment of His revelation means our elevation above ourselves. It is this that of necessity makes our knowledge of God a joyful action. A gratitude that consists in an involuntary, mutinous and therefore forced and unjoyful action is not thanksgiving. A tribute to tyranny, however paid, is not thanks. A sacrifice offered in dread and constraint is not, in the biblical sense at least, a real sacrifice. Sacrifice and thanks are only what is offered gladly. And the basis which make s the true knowledge of God necessary is in itself the basis of knowing God gladly.”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 219]

Excluding Any Faith of Man in Himself

“It is a decisive mark of what the Bible calls faith that everything stated about man as such, and about his bearing and circumstances, appears absolutely as the determination of his orientation to God as an object and therefore as the determination of his knowledge. Biblical faith excludes any faith of man in himself—that is, any desire for religious self-help, any religious self-satisfaction, any religious self-sufficiency. Biblical faith lives upon the objectivity of God. In one way or another, God comes into the picture, the sphere, the field of man’s consideration and conception in exactly the same way that objects do, uniting Himself to man, distinguishing Himself from him, evoking by His existence and nature man’s love, trust and obedience; but before and in and above all this, bearing witness to Himself by establishing from His side this orientation of man, this uniting and distinguishing. Biblical faith stands or falls with the fact that it is faith in God.”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 14]

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]

Secretly Surrounded in All Lowliness

“The truth of Jesus Christ is not one truth among others; it is the truth, the universal truth that creates all truth as surely as it is the truth of God. For in Jesus Christ God has created all things, He has created all of us. We exist not apart from Him, but in Him, whether we are aware of it or not; and the whole cosmos exists not apaprt from him, but in Him, borne by Him, the Almighty Word. To know Him is to know all. To be touched and gripped by the Spirit in his realm means being led into all truth.

If a man believes and knows God, he can no longer ask, What is the meaning of my life? But by believing he actually lives the meaning of his life, the meaning of his creatureliness, of his individuality, in the limits of his creatureliness and individuality and in the fallibility of his existence, in the sin in which he is involved and of which daily and hourly he is guilty; yet he also lives it with the aid which is daily and hourly imparted to him through God’s interceding for him, in spite of him and without his deserving it. He recognises the task assigned to him in this whole, and the hope vouchsafed to him in and with this task, because of the grace by which he may live and the praise of the glory promised him, by which he is even here and now secretly surrounded in all lowliness.

The believer confesses this meaning of his existence. The Christian Creed speaks of God as the ground and goal of all that exists. The ground and goal of the entire cosmos means Jesus Christ. And the unheard-of thing may and must be said, that where Christian faith exists, there also exists, through God’s being trusted, inmost familiarity with the ground and goal of all that happens, of all things; there man lives, in spite of all that is said to the contrary, in the peace that passeth all understanding, and which for that very reason is the light that lightens our understanding.”

[Crikey. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 26–27]

The Difference Between Them and Us

“Ironically, this way of looking at things did not die when the myth that made it possible died (the myth being that everything really does mean everything). When, under the fluorescent glare of the laboratory lights, the old myth died and the new myth (that nothing means anything) took over, men, without realizing what they were doing kept on behaving and speaking of their experience as though everything meant everything. That is, their new myth told them that things are impersonal and abstract. They don’t mean anything; they are. The method that led to the new myth was called the scientific method. It became sovereign when it was given the authority of dogma in the eighteenth century. The process was called Enlightenment, and it is the myth with which the modern world bas supplanted the old myth.

But, oddly, the sovereignty of the new myth, ought to have slain the image-making inclination of man, since there is no reason at all to suppose, under the new, that one thing suggests another (lions suggesting kings who themselves suggest the King); no reason, that is, except fancy, for the laboratory has no equipment for chasing and tracing these orbiting and glorious correspondences in which the lion and the king appear as images; that is, as serious suggestions of something real). That sovereignty was like the sovereignty of the Roman emperor who insisted on being worshiped as a god. People obliged him but went on with their household gods anyway. 

The difference between them and us is that, whereas nobody supposed that he really was divine, we modern men have accepted the sovereignty of the new myth. We bow to the edict (Science is All) and then believe it. But, all the while, all unaware, we keep the old myth alive. It has trickled out of the old ages into the enlightened ages. It appears in a thousand ways, and in every case it belies the new myth. It is what makes us shake hands and set the table for lunch and say, ‘I felt like a fish out of water’, and bring out cake and candles for a birthday and dance and write sonnets and go behind closed doors for sexual intercourse and stand up for a woman or the President and go to Mass. It is what makes us put on one dress for shopping and another for cocktails and another for the opera and another for church. It is what makes us put on beads and paisley and steel rims if we feel one way about society, and button-down shirts and oxford cloth and plastic rims if we feel another way. For these things all suppose that one thing means another; that it is appropriate to make this (a handshake) say this (“Hello, I see you, I greet you”, etc.); that one may signal in this realm (clothes) what is at work in this realm (political philosophy); that we may enact thus (sex behind closed doors) what is, in fact, true (that this knowledge of other beings is high and holy and not for the marketplace); that when we speak this way about some common thing (a sonnet about evening) we may be speaking more accurately than when we speak analytically, since the poetry is itself perhaps a case in point of something that is exhibited in the colors, tranquility, and clarity of the evening.”

[Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance? A Critique of Modern Secularism, 4]

One Need Not Pass

“The sufficiency of Scripture means that in Holy Scripture may be found all that is needed for faith to know the gospel. Scripture is sufficient for its end, which is the publication of the saving knowledge of God. Holy reason therefore finds in Scripture its limit—that is, the point beyond which holy reason may not pass because it need not pass.”

[John Webster, Holiness, 20]

Optimism Rather than Pessimism

“There were further consequences to basic assumptions about authority, none of which were good news for a Church hierarchy that claimed to have proprietorial rights over what to believe. Printing, which produced multiple identical copies of a text, encouraged a familiarity with uniformity, very different from the individuality of a manuscript. That in turn was liable to produce a sense of how significant it was when difference appeared: Uniformity paradoxically put a premium on individuality. A culture based on manuscripts is conscious of the fragility of knowledge, and the need to preserve it. A priority must be to keep it secure simply to avoid the physical destruction of a single precious source, and that fosters an attitude that guards rather than spreads knowledge. Print culture multiplies copies, and the printer has a vested interest in as much multiplication as possible, to sell his wares. Similarly, a manuscript culture is going to believe very readily in decay, in knowledge as in everything else, because copying knowledge from one manuscript to another is a very literal source of corruption. This is much less obvious in the print medium: Optimism may be the mood rather than pessimism.”

[Diarmid MacCullough, The Reformation, 71]

Looking Forward Or Backward

“The effect of printing was more profound than simply making more books available more quickly. It affected western Europe’s assumptions about knowledge and originality of though. Before the invention of printing, a major part of a scholar’s life was spent copying existing texts by hand, simply in order to have access to them. Now that printed copies of texts were increasingly available, there was less copying to do, and so there was more time to devote to thinking for oneself. That had implications for scholarly respect for what previous generations had said. Copying had bee such a significant activity that in previous centuries of Christian culture, it had been given a privileged place against original thought. The thirteenth-century Franciscan scholar and devotional writer Bonaventure discussed various categories that might be discussed various categories that might be described as writing: of his four variants, none included pure authorship of a new book as we would understand it today. He spoke of the writer as scribe (that is, a copyist), as compiler of anthologies, as commentator on older texts, and finally as ‘auctor’—but even then, that meant someone who produced ‘his own work in principal place adding others for purposes of confirmation.’ Such a hierarchy of functions would seem bizarrely out of proportion after the fifteenth century.”

[Diarmid MacCullough, The Reformation, 71]