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 It’s Really All About God CD equals Barth’s Church Dogmatics.
Series Posts
1—Introduction
2—“God Speaks”
3—“God’s Revelation is Jesus Christ”
3—Conclusion
“GOD’S REVELATION IS JESUS CHRIST”
Not only do leaders within the emerging church question our ability to know God and wonder about the extent to which God has truly spoken, the center of that knowledge and speaking is questions, too. The historic Christian faith has taken seriously Jesus’ own claim in John 14:9 that, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” In the past, it was believed that God the Father is revealed in God the Son, the One True God is only found in Jesus Christ. Now, however, even this central idea to the Rule of Faith is questioned.
In an essay in An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, Samir Selmanovic participates in this questioning when he claims, “We do believe that God is best defined by the historical revelation in Jesus Christ, but to believe that God is limited to it would be an attempt to manage God. If one holds that Christ is confined to Christianity, one has chosen a god that is not sovereign.”(emphasis mine) (129) In fact, he writes elsewhere that the revelation of the grace of God through Jesus Christ, which is so central to the Rule of Faith of historic Christianity, is not exclusively limited to that faith or person, either. “We Christians have insisted that our revelation is the only container and only dispenser of grace. The rest of the world, graced from within, has been steadily proving us wrong. Grace is independent.” (52) The revelation that has come through the Holy Scriptures and Jesus Christ himself are not the only containers of God’s grace; grace is found outside the Christian Story. According to Selmanovic, neither the revelation of God Himself nor of His grace is contained or confined to Jesus Christ.
In his newly released book, It’s Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian, Selmanovic continues his initial thoughts on God’s Christian containment by arguing, “to say God has decided to visit all humanity through only one particular religion is a deeply unsatisfying assertion about God.”(9) In order to protect his argument in favor of religious pluralism, he claims that none of us are in charge of God, God refuses to be owned and to comply with our religious constructs. (16, 18) In fact, “As long as those of us who are Christians insist on staying enclosed in our own world of meanings, we have nothing more to say to the world. Without recognizing God, grace, and goodness outside of the boundaries we have made and without the possibility of expanding our understanding of God, grace, and goodness, we have come to a place where Christianity as we know it must either end or experience another Exodus.” (60-61)
In experiencing another Exodus, Christians must acknowledge that God is everywhere—in every person, every community, and all creation—otherwise we will loose the basis for seeing God anywhere. (61, 64) Ultimately, Selmanovic insists that “the Christianity that claims exclusive possession of God’s revelation in the person of Jesus has hijacked that same God from the world.”(68) After reducing Christianity to one of three monotheistic “religions,” Selmanovic shows his real hand: “People want God, but not one who is the captive of a religion. They want an unmanaged God. Free God. That’s where hope comes from.” (90, 92) Apparently, Selmanovic also desires a God free from religion, Christianity, Jesus Christ.
Barth paints a very different picture in his Dogmatics, however. He boldly asserts that God’s revelation is only, exclusively in Jesus Christ. While Selmanovic believes that God is simply best defined by the historical revelation in Jesus Christ, Barth insists God is only defined by Jesus Christ. To suggest that God is not limited to “the historical revelation in Jesus Christ” is foreign to the Holy Scriptures and historic Rule of Faith. Barth argues this very point when he writes, “[God] is wholly and utterly in His revelation in Jesus Christ.”(CD II,1:75) He also makes plain that we must know Jesus in order to know God, because “in him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). (CD II,1:252) Furthermore, Barth makes clear that what he describes in his Dogmatics is the knowledge of God as found in the knowledge of Jesus; unless Jesus Christ is the reference point for the revelation of God, “we have not described it in faith, or as the knowledge of faith, and therefore not in any sense as the true knowledge of God.” (CD II,1:252)
While Selmanovic may believe that “Grace did not start with Christianity and will not end with Christianity. It is a common thing in this world,” (51) Barth argues, “When we appeal to God’s grace, we appeal to the grace of the incarnation and to [Jesus Christ] as the One in whom, because He is the eternal Son of God, knowledge of God was, is and will be present originally and properly.” (CD II,1:252) For Barth, the revelation of God through grace is intimately and only connected to Jesus Christ because His own act of divine self-disclosure is bound up with Him, too. Jesus Christ is given to the whole being of God, not simply a part of Him, and God is not known at all unless He is known in His entirety as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer. (CD II,1:51-52) It is in His grace through Jesus Christ that God is known as Reconciler and Redeemer. Rather than experiencing the knowledge of God and His grace apart from Jesus Christ, both are intimately connected to Him. It is only in Jesus Christ that we know and understand God and His grace, which is revealed in the gospel that defines life.
Selmanovic goes on to rhetorically wonder, “Is our religion the only one that understands the true meaning of life? Or does God place his truth in others too? Well, God decides, and not us. The gospel is not our gospel, but the gospel of the kingdom of God, and what belongs to the kingdom of God cannot be hijacked by Christianity.” (“The Sweet Problem of Inclusivism,” 194) In this argument Selmanovic does two things: 1) the Kingdom of God is not connect simply to Jesus; and 2) the Kingdom of God itself is a vehicle of what Barth call’s “divine immanence.”
Barth, however, makes it clear that God’s Kingdom is not known at all apart from Jesus Christ, and doing otherwise establishes a Christian heresy. As he warns, “Christian heresies spring from the fact that man does not take seriously the known ground of divine immanence in Jesus Christ, so that from its revelation, instead of apprehending Jesus Christ and the totality in Him, he arbitrarily selects this or that feature and sets it up as a subordinate centre: perhaps the idea of creation…or even the kingdom of God.” (CD II,1:319)
First, Selmanovic clearly describes the kingdom of God in terms that are utterly disconnected from Jesus Christ alone. Secondly, he has selected the feature of the kingdom of God and believes it as a revelatory ground of “divine immanence,” instead of Jesus Christ alone. Barth counters that such people are “oblivious of the fact that [divine] immanence both as a whole and in its parts has Christian truth and reality only in so far as it is founded in Jesus Christ and summed up in Him, so that if, as a whole and in its parts, it is affirmed, preached and believed as a centre in itself and alongside Christ, the Church will inevitably be led back into heathendom and its worship of the elements.” (CD II,1:319) Selmanovic affirms this devastating indictment by claiming the Kingdom is not exclusively limited to Jesus Christ:
Many Christians believe that the Kingdom of God that Jesus spoke about is inseparable from knowing the person of Jesus. If so, the question begs to be asked: Is the Kingdom of God present in all of life, among all people, throughout history, or is the Kingdom of God limited to the historical person of Jesus and thus absent from most of life, most people, and most history? The answer to this question depends greatly on whether Christians are willing to make their religion take a backseat to something larger than itself. (76-77)
Selmanovic completely disconnects God’s revelation from the person of Jesus Christ and makes it no longer exclusively connected to him, too. In light of these observations it seems clear enough from Selmanovic’s arguments that the kingdom of God, as part of divine immanence, has been wrested from its moorings in Jesus Christ and is “affirmed, preached and believed as a centre in itself and alongside Christ.” God is now revealed in the kingdom of God and alongside from Jesus Christ, not through Him alone.
Not only does Selmanovic believe that the kingdom of God apart from Jesus Christ reveals God, he denies that God is revealed fully and exclusively in Him. Selmanovic both favors another revelation of God apart from Jesus Christ (the kingdom of God) and denies that the fulness of God’s revelation is in Him alone. As Barth reminds us, though, “Any deviation, any attempt to evade Jesus Christ in favour of another supposed revelation of God, or any denial of the fulness of God’s presence in Him, will precipitate us into darkness and confusion.”(CD II,1:319) According to Barth, then, Selmanovic’s belief that God is revealed in a separate act of divine immanence (the kingdom of God) apart from Jesus Christ “will precipitate us into darkness and confusion.” Likewise, his assertion that God is not revealed wholly, simply, exclusively in Jesus Christ will have the same result. At this point it is clear Selmanovic’s belief in the revelation and knowledge of God largely departs from the historic Rule of Faith of the Church. In response Barth would adamantly declare it is really not all about God. It is really all about Jesus Christ.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks