Barth offers, as usual, a brilliant description of God’s uniqueness as that has been understood in the doctrinal development and witness of the historic Christian church. He writes:

Because the Church from the beginning understood the prophetic and apostolic testimony in this way, it responded from the first with a confession of His uniqueness as a kind of primary assertion. Because God is one is, according to Origen, the first of those appearances which were clearly passed down through apostolic preaching (Concerning Rulers I, Praef. 4). There is in all one rule in faith, which is alone unchanging and irreformable, namely belief in one God … (Tertullian, De virg. vel. 1). God, if he is not one, is not (Adv. Marc. 1, 3). Nothing is either above him or after him; nor is he moved by anything but his decree and freely he made all things since he alone is God, alone Lord, alone creator, alone father, alone holds together all things, and he is superior to all things that exist (Irenaeus, Adv. o. h. II, 1, 1). We believe that no nature except this one, neither angel, nor spirit, nor any power, this nature which is to be believed is God (Libellus in modum Symboli [5^th century?] Denz. No. 19). God is the One to whose magnitude, or majesty, or power, I would not say anything can be preferred, but nothing can be compared (Novatian, De trin. 31). Knowledge of God in the sense of the New Testament message, the knowledge of the triune God as constrasted with the whole world of religions in the first centuries, signified, and still signifies, the most radical “twilight of the gods,” the very thing which Schiller so movingly deplored as the de-divinisation of the “lovely world.” It was no mere fabrication when the early Church was accused by the world around it of atheism, and it would have been wiser for its apologists not to have defended themselves so keenly against this charge. There is a real basis for the feeling, current to this day, that every genuine proclamation of the Christian faith is a force disturbing to, even destructive of, the advance of religion, its life and richness and peace. It is bound to be so. Olympus and Valhalla decrease in population when the message of the God who is the one and only God is really known and believed. The figures of every religious culture are necessarily secularised and recede. They can keep themselves alive only as ideas, symbols, and ghosts, and finally as cosmic figures. And in the end even in this form they sink into oblivion. No sentence is more dangerous or revolutionary than that God is One and there is no other like Him. All the permanencies of the world draw their life from ideologies and mythologies, from open or disguised religions, and to this extent from all possible forms of deity and divinity. It was on the truth of the sentence that God is One that the “Third Reich” of Adolf Hitler made shipwreck. Let this sentence be uttered in such a way that it is heard and grasped, and at once 450 prophets of Baal are always in fear of their lives. There is no more room now for what the recent past called toleration. Beside God there are only His creatures or false gods, and beside faith in Him there are religions only as religions of superstition, error and finally irreligion.[1]

This is one of the reasons I continue to read Barth, liberally. His focus is theological proper, and this oriented and given shape by God’s Self-exegesis and revelation in Jesus Christ.

The unique nature of the Christian God, who is one in three / three in one, cannot be replicated; He is sui generis and disanalogous with anything or anyone in created history. Why? Because He is the triune Creator; by virtue of His status as the eternal life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this in interpenetrative co-inhering koinonia, He is His own self-sustaining limit. And thus, He is the One to whom we look for all life and sustenance. All other gods, mythologies, and atheistic self-worship through projection, which is what mythology entails, have no existence, and thus are contingent for their possibility, even as non-entities (if they are), upon the living Word of God. As Barth rightly notes, then, Christians, within the context of the verity of naturalistic and secular deities, ought to be understood as atheists; since Christians have a Yes-God who has no spatial or even spiritual conditioning by the created order. Christians worship a God that is not surmised, or posited based on naturalistic capacity; Christians worship a God that is imperceptible to natural wits—thus, to the outside unseeing world it appears that the Christian worships an a-theos (non-god). To be sure, though, all of humanity will either worship the true and living God, who is scandalously and particularly One, or they will worship something they self-construct in their own fallen image.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §31: Study Edition Vol 9 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 4-5.