Karl Barth is not for the faint of heart, particularly when he is referring to a doctrine of God. This post will not be for the faint of heart. This post is a continuation and development of my last couple of posts: picking up on the themes of Aristotle’s god, and also the doctrine of election, respectively. I wanted to share even more than I’m going to with reference to Barth’s argument against the analogy of being and a partitive conception of God. But the long quote I will share with you now comes as a summary to the two larger sections I had planned on sharing. You will notice him alluding to the analogy of being, and even directly bring up the concept of the unity of God in His Self-revelation. These are the bases of Barth’s hard critique against, in particular, the Roman Catholic conception of God. What you will see, if you are aware of what is currently happening in the retrieval movements of Reformed and evangelical theology, is that Barth’s critique of the Roman Catholic conception of God can equally be applied to the doctrine of God being retrieved by these evangelicals and Reformed; indeed, they are retrieving, for all intents and purposes, the Tridentine God for evangelical consumption.

Barth writes:

It is in this sense and for these reasons that we oppose the Roman Catholic doctrine of the knowability of God, and therefore that certo cognosci posse [‘can with certainty be known’]. Our opposition does not begin with the different answer that we have to give. It only emerges at that point. It begins with our differing putting of the question. And we are compelled to say that it is at this point and this point alone that we regard it as decisive and critical. If Roman Catholic doctrine affirms that reason can know God from the world, in the last resort that is only the necessary answer to the question as put by it. And ultimately—particularly when we have regard to the careful formulation of the Vaticanum, which never speaks of more than a posse [ability]—it is not in itself absolutely intolerable as an interpretation in meliorem partem [understood in a charitable sense]. The intolerable and unpardonable thing in Roman Catholic theology is that the question is put in this way, that there is this splitting up of the concept of God, and hand in hand with it the abstraction from the real work and activity of God in favour of a general being of God which He has in common with us and all being. To put the question in this way is to commit a twofold act of violence which means the introduction of a foreign god into the sphere of the Church. The fact that knowability is ascribed to this god, apart from his revelation, is in no way surprising. In itself it is even quite proper. This god really is knowable naturalis humanae rationis lumine e rebus creatis [‘from the created things, by the natural light of human reason’] apart from God, i.e., apart from God’s special help. But to affirm that the true, whole God, active and effective, the Head and Shepherd of the Church, can be knowable in this way is only possible if He has already been identified with that false god. What thanks do we owe to that god for the benefit and the grace and mercy of his revelation? Between him and man the relationship is obviously very different. It is not that a door can be opened only from within. On the contrary, man has free ingress and egress of his own authority and power. Quite apart from grace and miracle, has not man always had what is in relation to the being of the world the very “natural” capacity to persuade himself and others of a higher and divine being? All idols spring from this capacity. And the really wicked and damnable thing in the Roman Catholic doctrine is that it equates the Lord of the Church with that idol and says of Him therefore the very thing that would naturally be said of it. This is the decisive difference between them and us. There is therefore no sense in contrasting their theses and ours in detail and discussing them in this contrast. Our primary contradiction is not of the “natural theology” of the Vaticanum as such. This is only a self-evident consequence of our initial contradiction of its concept of God. We reject this because it is a construct which obviously derives from an attempt to unite Yahweh with Baal, the triune God of Holy Scripture with the concept of being of Aristotelian and Stoic philosophy. The assertion that reason can know God from created things applies to the second and heathenish component of this concept of God, so that when we view the construct on this side we do not recognise God in it at all, nor can we accept it as a Christian concept of God. But that means that for us the assertion has no solid foundation. We cannot, therefore, attack it in detail. For how can we attack it? We can only say Yes and Amen to it as far as it applies to the god, the false god, to whom it refers. It is in itself incorrigible. But we cannot allow that it says anything about God at all, or that it is one of the assertions which have to be made in the Christian doctrine of God.[1]

What Barth is communicating seems rather self-explanatory. What I am hoping is that it communicates just how radical of a proposal I am committed to when it comes to a knowledge of the true and living God. I fully endorse everything Barth writes in the quote I just shared from him. To rely on versions of God that we can ostensibly connive on our own [even redeemed] reason is no different than what the Israelites attempted to do when they constructed a golden calf, or worshiped God from their ‘high places.’

My contention, along with Barth, is that the God who not only the Roman Catholics, but many of the Protestants among us, are claiming as God is not in fact the true and genuine God come in the revelation of Godself in Jesus Christ. The consequences and implications of this are not lost on me. What Barth is claiming is what Feuerbach was claiming before him. That is, that any conception of God come to apart from reliance upon God’s Self-revelation, and the capacity to know this God by personal participation with this God in the humanity of Jesus Christ, is what Barth elsewhere calls the no-God. Knowledge of God, for Barth, is not arrived at by reason’s self-reflection on nature. Knowledge of God, for Barth, is arrived at by reason of God’s Self-revelation of His divine nature for us as that comes mediate in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. Anything short of this can only be an idol god who does not represent the fully divine impress of the God for us and in us by the Spirit in Jesus Christ. This is as radical as it gets, and is something to come to grips with.

[1] Barth, CD II/1 §26 (T&T Clark Study Edition), 82-3.