Karl Barth is often derided by evangelicals and contemporary Reformed orthodox types for rejecting a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its underlying fount in a doctrine of Divine-verbal inspiration. This reception of Barth is understandable insofar that Barth does in fact say that he rejects the modern development known as inerrancy. But what shouldn’t be taken from this is that Barth somehow is holding hands with the Teutonic higher critics of the Bible; he is not! In fact, Barth is desirous, in a sense, of rescuing the Bible from the fires of Mordor as those are stoked by the ‘Bible critics.’ I would contend that it can be argued that Barth has a higher view of Scripture, formally, than even those who claim to affirm a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its attendant understanding of Divine inspiration.
Barth firmly believes that the Post Reformed orthodox theologians were intent on securing the veracity and infallibility of Holy Scripture; this can be seen, as Barth underscores, the ‘Protestant Scripture Principle,’ which became the formal principle of the Reformed reformational theology. Barth was of the mind that the early Reformed theologians were eager in safeguarding the Bible from her early critics within early modernity (as that was fomenting in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively). But just as the Fundamentalists of the 20th century built a theology upon their reaction to the higher critics of the 19th century, thus allowing the higher critics to set the agenda and categories and questions that “needed to be responded to,” similarly, I would argue that Barth maintained that the earlier and middle Reformed theologians allowed the early and developing rationalists of the time to set the agenda and categories and questions that ostensibly needed to be responded to. As such, in Barth’s mind, even those purportedly committed to the Protestant Scripture Principle, its defenders no less, so allowed their categories to be sublimated by their counterparts, that they ended up denuding the category of revelation itself vis-à-vis Holy Scripture, such that Holy Scripture lost its “Holy” character by being relegated to the level of just another profane book.
Barth writes,
We must not forget that the transition from biblical to biblicist thought does involve the transition to a rationalism—supranaturalistic thought it is in content. Therefore the relationship of theology to the truths of revelation which it has taken from the Bible is no longer the relationship to an authority which superior to man. It has fundamentally the same assurance and control with regard to them as man as a rational creature has in regard to himself, his experience, his thinking and therefore his world, believing that he is the master of himself as subject and therefore of his objects, or of his own relation to them.
As is well known the supreme achievement of the older Protestant orthodoxy was the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture as developed in the later 17th century and given confessional status in the Helvetic Formula of Concord in 1675. There can be no doubt, however, that this was not merely worked out as a bulwark against a growing rationalism, but that it was itself, not an expression of an over-developed faith of revelation, but a product of typical rationalistic thinking—the attempt to replace faith and indirect knowledge by direct knowledge, to assure oneself of revelation in such a way that it was divorced from the living Word of the living God as attested in Scripture, pin-pointing it, making it readily apprehensible as though it were an object of secular experience, and therefore divesting it in fact of its character as revelation.
The irremediable danger of consulting Holy Scripture apart from the centre, and in such a way that the question of Jesus Christ ceases to be the controlling and comprehensive question and simply becomes on amongst others, consists primarily in the fact that (even presupposing a strict and exclusive Scripture principle) Scripture is thought of and used as though the message of revelation and the Word of God could be extracted from it in the same way as the message of other truth or reality can be extracted from other sources of knowledge, at any rate where it is not presumably speaking of Jesus Christ. But if Scripture is read in this way, the Scripture principle will not stand very long. Secretly the book of revelation is being treated and read like other books; and the question cannot long be denied whether the message we gather from it cannot be gathered from other books either by way of addition or even basically; whether the truths of revelation in the Bible are not of a series with all kinds of other truths; whether in them we do no simply have concretions of what is revealed concerning God and His will to all other men as such and by nature, of themselves, by the dictate of their reason? If Jesus Christ is seen to be the whole of Scripture, the one truth of revelation, this question cannot even be put, let alone given a positive answer. There is no other book which witnesses to Jesus Christ apart from Holy Scripture. This decides the fact that only in Holy Scripture do we have to do with the one and the whole Word and revelation of God. But if we do not see this, it is inevitable that the question of other sources of revelation should be put, and that sooner or later it should be given a positive answer.[1]
Barth is attempting to correct what he sees as a misstep made early on by the scholastics Reformed in their attempt to protect and elevate Holy Scripture; and this, based upon what he takes to be the wrong foundations. As clearly indicated by Barth’s above passage he believes that it is only when Holy Scripture is grounded in and framed by its reality in Jesus Christ that it can maintain its elevated and ‘Holy’ status as the written Word of God for humanity, for the church. Barth’s concern is always to unhitch the holiness of God from our own fallen and abstract speculations, and instead to ground them in the holy and elevated revelation of God’s triune life for the world in the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. His critique of the normal receptions and understandings of the scholastics Reformed up to and including contemporary Reformed and evangelical theology cuts across this whole swath.
Conversely, Barth isn’t out to destroy the veracity or authority of Holy Scripture. Au contraire, he is seeking to provide a truly evangelical basis and theory of revelation for Scripture’s elevated status as the place where its gladhands are securely connected to its reality in the big-Hand of the Father as that is extended to us in the pierced hands of Jesus Christ. I think Barth might, at times, overextend himself when he refers to biblical inerrancy (see his Göttingen Dogmatics and Evangelical Theology: An Introduction), and come off sounding like he rejects the absolute veracity and holiness of the Bible. But even in the short passage we just read from him, it ought to become immediately apparent that this was not Barth’s intention whatsoever. In fact, if Barth’s critique is sound, and I think it is, it is the ostensible stalwarts of a biblical inerrancy and verbal inspiration, the contemporary Reformed and evangelicals among us, who unwittingly lower Holy Scripture’s provenance into the wastelands of the rationalists (Socinians) and higher biblical critics. Barth offers an alternative theory of revelation, inclusive of biblical revelation, particularly as he articulates that in his threefold form of the Word of God (and please understand, dear reader, that the scholastics Reformed first developed what has been identified as a fourfold form of the Word of God—so the heuristic is not a novelty developed by Barth, per se). Give him a fair hearing, and not a distorted one based upon his antagonists. Barth has a higher view of Scripture, based upon his christologically conditioned theory of revelation, than do, ironically, his critics on this very subject.
[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [368-69] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 11.