Ha, tricked you! Actually this post is directly dealing with the ‘material Barth,’ he is not anything like the ‘material girl’. The ‘material Barth’ goes beyond the politicking that has unfortunately marginalized Barth for many; the material Barth (and what I mean by this frame) engages directly with what Barth has communicated materially and theologically. So I am asking you, dear reader, to lay aside the caricatures and pretensions you might have with Karl Barth’s theory of revelation, theory of knowledge of God, and consider him more critically in light of your own material theological commitments on this important locus; the locus being: how do we have a genuine knowledge of God?
The reason I am so concerned about the issue I am going to highlight here in this post has to do with a very practical issue, an existential issue, even. I was in a unique and almost unbelievable evangelistic situation yesterday as I was being seen by a doctor. In the process of my exam somehow the fact that I was a Christian came up, and the fact that she was a former Christian but not one now (since she was 32), and that she sees Christ as in-credible came up. We had an interesting discussion, in a strange context (really). But what this prompted, once again, in my thinking, is how do we have knowledge of God? Is it something that we, out of our own analytical powers construct by our free choice to do so? And out of these intellectual powers that we purportedly have do we have the capacity to conceive of the categories that God must fit into? This doctor I was being examined by used her ‘powers’ to snuff the Christian God out of her life. But I got the distinct impression that she wasn’t reading the Christian God through the right categories; categories that come from ‘faith’. In other words, it seemed that she was putting herself, her experiences, and her rationalizations prior to meeting with God instead of allowing God to shape and reshape all of her preconceived images of him–and so based upon her machinations about God, through her natural categories about God, she rejected this God.
What makes what she is doing, other than predisposition and asserted posture, different than what natural theologians do? Natural theologians start with analytical categories about God derived from reflection upon nature, and use the grammar created by said reflection and active intellects to conceive of how God is and acts; some of these Natural Theologians sound very very orthodox. In fact, much of what passes as the Orthodox understanding of God is driven by natural theology categories. Am I suggesting that divine impassibility and immutability, for example, are heretical concepts, or Hellenized concepts, to the point that these two examples of what is included in the Orthodox understanding of God should be rejected out of hand? No, not necessarily. What I am suggesting is that if knowledge of God is not slavishly driven by God’s own Self revelation in Jesus Christ, if we go to a general revelation of God in creation, and try to conceive of God prior to conceiving of him in his own Self-conception in Christ, then these categories (like immutability and impassibility) end up morphing God into something that he is not, or at least not in the way these categories (as examples) are deployed in articulating God.
Karl Barth, more succinctly makes what I have been struggling to communicate more clear:
True knowledge of God is not and cannot be attacked; it is without anxiety and without doubt. But only that which is fulfilled under the constraint of God’s Word is such a true knowledge of God. Any escape out of the constraint of the Word of God means crossing over to the false gods and no-gods. And this will show itself by leading inevitably to uncertainty in the knowledge of God, and therefore to doubt. A knowledge of God which is the knowledge of false gods can be attacked, and, indeed, is attacked. Under the constraint of the Word, however, only the question as to the mode of knowledge and of the knowability of God can be put–in the freedom and therefore in the certainty which reigns when the choice is arbitrary. The battle against uncertainty and doubt is not foreign to man even here. But here it will always be a victorious battle. For it goes to the very root of uncertainty and doubt, and it will be simply the one good fight of faith–the fight for a renewal of the confirmation and acknowledgement of our constraint by God’s Word as the point of departure from which uncertainty and doubt become impossible possibilities.[1]
We, of course, here Anselm’s fides quarens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’) mantra in Barth, and we also see Anselm’s type of ontological argument funding what Barth is communicating. But beyond these formalities, getting into the material subject, if what Barth is communicating about the ‘Word’s’ power to guide and direct inquiry into who God is was at the forefront of this doctor’s mind, or in the forefront of the natural theologian’s heart, I think the outcome would be much different for both. I think this doctor who was a professing Christian for 32 years of her life may have well not rejected Christ; and I think natural theologians in general would not attempt to rest upon their analytical laurels when type-setting God, and instead would find their address reposing from within God’s own Self-address driven and given life by the Son, by Jesus Christ.
To close, if what Barth communicated above isn’t clear enough, let me share something from Barth’s best English speaking student, Thomas Torrance to the same effect:
Because Jesus Christ is the Way, as well as the Truth and the Life, theological thought is limited and bounded and directed by this historical reality in whom we meet the Truth of God. That prohibits theological thought from wandering at will across open country, from straying over history in general or from occupying itself with some other history, rather than this concrete history in the centre of all history. Thus theological thought is distinguished from every empty conceptual thought, from every science of pure possibility, and from every kind of merely formal thinking, by being mastered and determined by the special history of Jesus Christ.[2]
[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics §II.1 The Doctrine of God (London/New York: T&T Clark A Continuum Imprint, 2009), 5.
[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910-1931, 196.