A 4 week series based on a paper called “DIGGING UP THE PAST: KARL BARTH AS FOE TO THE EMERGING CHURCH ON THE DOCTRINE OF REVELATION.” Non-identified citations relate to Rollin’s How (Not) To Speak of God. CD equals Barth’s Church Dogmatics.
Series Posts
1—Introduction
2—“God Speaks”
3—“God’s Revelation is Jesus Christ”
3—Conclusion
“GOD SPEAKS”
In How (Not) to Speak of God, Rollins operates from the assumption that, “That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.” (xii) Though we are called to continually speak of God, we cannot really ever speak of or actually describe Him. Throughout this rhetorical tour de force, Rollins attempts to re-understand the traditional understanding of the nature of God’s self-disclosure along such fault lines.
As Rollins explains, traditionally Christianity has been understood to rest upon the idea that God has communicated to humanity through revelation, a concept that has been known as “that which reveals,” is the opposite of concealment, and God has graciously disclosed to us something about himself. In other words, in the past revelation meant God has actually revealed, de-concealed, and graciously disclosed Himself to the world. In fact, Rollins suggests it is thought that “Christianity…has privileged access to the mind of God,” an access which is contained and controlled by Christianity alone. (7) Rollins believes otherwise.
According to Rollins, this idea of revelation came after Christianity (falsely) embraced the Age of Reason, believing that “God was open to our understanding insomuch as God was revealed to us through the scripture.” (9) For these Enlightenment Christians, it was simple: God gave us a document (the Holy Scriptures) and the ability to understand and explore that document (the mind), thus providing access to God’s full, real Self (revelation). For Rollins, however, this notion of theistic accessibility is nothing short of “conceptual idolatry.” He insists the idea of any system of thought which the individual or community takes to be a visible rendering of God—in this case an intellectual rendering—is neither God nor of God, but is instead an anthropocentric construct, an idol. (12) Rollins insists that Western theology has reduced God to conceptual idols by the very exercise of naming God. Instead Rollins suggests God is not only unnameable, He is omninameable, he cannot be revealed through human words, and at the site of revelation, even when we think we can see God revealed to us, “we can only speak of God’s otherness and distance; Revelation has concealment built into its very heart.” (13, 14, 15, 16)
Rollins believes that Christianity has far too much confidence in a full divine self-disclosure, too much confidence in an actual complete revelation at God’s own behest, resulting in an overly defined, imbued “God” term. “If we fail to recognize that the term ‘God’ always falls short of that towards which the word is supposed to point, we will end up bowing down before our own conceptual creations forged from the raw materials of our self-image, rather than bowing before the one who stands over and above that creation.” (19) Christianity, especially the Western variety, has and is bowing before self-made revelatory “blocks of wood” in the form of theological constructs.
These constructs never really point to God Himself, however, because God blinds us with too much information about Himself. We must realize that our understanding of God comes as a result of One who overflows and blinds our understanding; God’s incoming blinds our intellect, saturates our understanding with a blinding presence, and gives us far too much information, resulting in an intellectual “short-circuiting” by the excess of presence. (22, 24) Ironically, while God blinds us with His presence, he agrees with Gregory of Nyssa that the more we move toward God we journey into divine darkness. While religious knowledge begins as an experience of entering into the light, the deeper we go the more darkness we find in that light; God is beyond the reach of all thinking. (27) In short, “Christianity testifies to the impossibility of grasping God because of the hyper-presence of God.” Barth would suggest otherwise, however.
For Barth, there is real, genuine knowledge of God because God has chosen to really, genuinely disclose Himself to us. Through His own purpose and volition, God made the decision to encounter man. “God encounters man in such a way that man can know Him. He encounters him in such a way that in this encounter He still remains God, but also raises man up to be a real, genuine knower of Himself.” (CD II,1:32) Rather than being hyper-hidden and overly concealed, God sets Himself before man in such away that he can really and genuinely speak of and describe Him. In other words, God is “graspable” by the very fact He has placed Himself before man to be grasped. In fact, though Barth does acknowledge a hiddenness and mystery to even His revelation, God has made Himself “clear and certain to us,” seeing to it that He not only does not remain to us hidden, but that we already have this knowledge from God Himself. (CD II,1:39) We can really and genuinely know God because He has chosen to show Himself to us in such a way that He can be considered and conceived by us. (CD II,1:10) What we must understand, however, is that this knowledge is not from us, but from God.
This knowledge of which we speak “cannot at any moment or in any respect try to understand itself other than as the knowledge made possible, realized and ordered by God alone.” (CD II,1:41) In part, this is the point Rollins attempts to make: the source of our desire (God) is set as an object that we reflect upon in order to grasp it, hold it. (1-2) In an effort to maintain God’s “otherness” and “beyondness,” Rollins ultimately makes God unreachable and unknowable. Furthermore, he argues that even when we describe God and claim a knowledge of Him, that claim and knowledge isn’t really even God Himself, but our understanding of God. (98) As Barth insists, however, “there is a readiness of God to be known as He actually is known in the fulfillment in which the knowledge of God is a fact.” (emphasis mine) (CD II,1:65)
Rather than being hyper-hidden and our God-talk other than God Himself, God can be known because God wants to be known and what we say of God, by His grace, is really God. As Barth continues, “‘God is knowable’ means God can be known—He can be known of and by Himself; in His essence, as it is turned to us in His activity, He is so constituted that He can be known by us.” (CD II,1:65) God has in fact set Himself before man in such away that we can confidently say “God can be known.”
While human efforts at accurately and exhaustively describing God are fraught with inconsistencies, fragility, and incompleteness because man is fallen and sinful, “God makes Himself known and offers Himself to us, so that we can in fact love Him as the one who exists for us…and He creates in us the possibility—the willingness and readiness—to know Him; so that, seen from our side also, there is no reason why this should not actually happen.” (CD II,1:33) Real, genuine knowledge of God can “actually happen” because we have a revelation from Him that comes to us in a manner that is intelligible, accessible, and clear.
This revelation is clear, accessible, and intelligible not because we ourselves are capable of thinking our way to God through our own ingenuity and gumption, though. Barth makes it clear that, “it is by the grace of God and only by the grace of God that it comes about that God is knowable to us…He gives Himself to us to be known, which establishes our knowledge of Him. God’s revelation is not at our power and command, but happens as a movement ‘from God.’” (CD II,1:28) Barth also makes it incredibly clear that this ultimate movement of God to reveal Himself to humanity was through Jesus Christ, an assertion that is as questioned as our ability to even know God.
