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God Here and Now
Karl Barth was, without doubt, one of the most significant religious thinkers of modern times. His radical affirmation of the revealed truth of Christianity changed the course of Christian theology in the twentieth century and is a source of inspiration for countless believers. Pope Pius XII declared that there had been nothing like Karl Barth's later thought since Thomas Aquinas. God Here and Now offers a succinct and accessible overview of that thought. In it, Barth outlines his position on the fundamental tenets of Christian belief, from the decision of faith to the authority of the Bible, and from the interpretation of grace to the significance of Jesus Christ. In this way Barth challenges each and every reader to discover what it means to encounter God, here and now.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1964
About the author
Karl Barth
474 books267 followersProtestant theologian Karl Barth, a Swiss, advocated a return to the principles of the Reformation and the teachings of the Bible; his published works include
Church Dogmatics
from 1932.
Critics hold Karl Barth among the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century; Pope Pius XII described him as the most important since Saint Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with his experience as a pastor, he rejected his typical predominant liberal, especially German training of 19th century.
Instead, he embarked on a new path, initially called dialectical, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth—for instance, God is both grace and judgment), but more accurately called a of the Word. Critics referred to this father of new orthodoxy, a pejorative term that he emphatically rejected. His thought emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his innovative doctrine of election. His enormously influenced throughout Europe and America.
Critics hold Karl Barth among the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century; Pope Pius XII described him as the most important since Saint Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with his experience as a pastor, he rejected his typical predominant liberal, especially German training of 19th century.
Instead, he embarked on a new path, initially called dialectical, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth—for instance, God is both grace and judgment), but more accurately called a of the Word. Critics referred to this father of new orthodoxy, a pejorative term that he emphatically rejected. His thought emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his innovative doctrine of election. His enormously influenced throughout Europe and America.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 1, 2008
This book provided a sort of mental landslide at an important time in my life. Barth is radical because he's so conservative and so aggressively so. An intellectual with a ruthless intelligence and a grinding thoroughness. He made me realize that Christianity makes sense only when viewed from the perspective of Christianity and without such a perspective it makes no sense. The swing that occurred with me philosophically against a wishy-washy universalism (prevalent in my thinking about religion from high school to the sophomore year of college) was grounded in the reading of this book. Barth is hard. On a lot of levels. To just get through and read and semi-comprehend. And to swallow as a theory once you DO understand it. But he made me realize that for my Christianity to mean anything it must first be Christian and thus must first deal with Christ and from there proceed. Any other attempt at Christianity would be doomed to failure. These last two sentences mark a radical shift in my understanding of what my religion is, says, and means to me.
August 5, 2021
Throughout the years I've heard some accusations that Barth is not Christian enough, that his message is not as uncompromising as a Calvinist might, that his position on Biblical Infallibility makes him unreliable, and so on. But this book shows that that does not have a bearing on his belief of the irreplaceability of the Christian message. Here, Barth is as Christian and almost preachy as you can be. He proclaimed many times that Christianity is unique, its watered down version will make it ineffective, that the Christian message has to be proclaimed rather than simply being an inner reflection. The final chapter is interesting as it shows how Barth engages with his fellow contributors in a humanist conference. The enlightenment and non-Christian camps (the renowned JBS Haldane among them) proclaimed a humanistic vision so contrary to the Christian exclusivistic message that Barth was ridiculed a number of times for this. An interesting read, although rather dry and lacking in anecdoates.
September 9, 2013
While I can't get on board with his specifically Reformed elements of his philosophy, I adore Barth for just about everything else. This book characterizes what I also admire most about Barth as a theologian: he's a 20th century Christian intellectual/academic and *gasp* he actually takes the Bible/faith seriously! Who knew Christian intellectuals still did that?! *glares at Caputo*
August 6, 2021
This book clears up misinterpretations of Karl Barth. In his own words he explains it pretty well although it is not an easy task to follow his way of thinking, which is the reason why I took a pretty long time reading this fairly short book. Karl Barth writes this book in a sort of provocative way, as if he is preaching as could be seen clearly from the very first chapter.
His views on the authority of the Scriptures may differ from what I usually hear from the Van Tillian camp, but Barth's view sounds more convincing to me. I think Barth successfully presents Christianity in its essence and the relation between God and man in history.
His views on the authority of the Scriptures may differ from what I usually hear from the Van Tillian camp, but Barth's view sounds more convincing to me. I think Barth successfully presents Christianity in its essence and the relation between God and man in history.
October 2, 2022
God Here and Now (1964) is a collection of addresses and essays that explore fundamental tenets of Christianity from a Protestant theologian’s point of view. Covering the gospel, faith, grace, the Bible, the Church, ethics, and humanism, it poses questions on what it means to meet God in today’s world.
Karl Barth (1886-1968). Protestant theologian, born in Basel, who has been described as ‘the Einstein of twentieth-century theology.’
---
A beginner’s guide to some of Karl Barth’s big ideas.
Many consider Karl Barth to be one of the most important Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. His writings have been characterized as brilliant and creative, and they continue to influence religious thinkers today. On the other hand, he’s also been deemed contradictory, verbose, and frustrating; his unfinished magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, has over 12,000 pages!
This book, though, looks at one of Barth’s much shorter works: God Here and Now, a collection of seven essays and addresses on the gospel, faith, grace, the Bible, the Church, ethics, and humanism. It attempts to distill his complex ruminations into a simple, clear message on what it means to meet God today. We had to look into the Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth occasionally to understand some of the ideas that Barth shares quite implicitly.
---
“God is the wholly other.”
Let’s start at the beginning. What is theology?
Look up the word in a dictionary and you’ll learn that it consists of two parts, both of which are Greek. The first is the noun theos, meaning “God.” Then there’s the suffix, “-logy,” which refers to a body of knowledge. Just as sociology is a body of knowledge about society, theology is a body of knowledge about God. There’s the first part of our answer.
But we can dig a bit deeper. The root of that “-logy” suffix is the Greek verb legein, meaning “to speak.” So there’s the second part of the answer: theology is the act of speaking about God.
And that’s pretty much how the Swiss theologian Karl Barth – the subject of this book– defined it. Theologians, he said, ought to talk about God. Ought, though, presupposes that one can talk about God. As a young man at the beginning of the twentieth century, Barth wasn’t at all sure that was possible. Why not? The long answer is, well, long. Unpacking it will take us to the heart of Barth’s theology – and the end of this book. But here’s the short version.
God, Barth insists, is der ganz Andere – “the wholly other.” God and humanity are entirely different, and the gap between us and the divine is a vast chasm. Simply put, God is heaven – and we are on Earth. We strive to know God, but God is the great unknown. God is neither a substance we can grasp with our worldly senses nor a metaphysical entity alongside other such entities. God stands outside everything because he is the origin of everything that isn’t God.
So where does that leave theology? As Barth saw it, lots of theologians had dodged the all-important question of how flawed humans can talk about a perfect, unknowable God. That dodge usually took one of two forms. They either fell back onto orthodoxy and argued that God was simply knowable through scripture, especially when it was interpreted by experts – theologians. Or they argued that humans had an innate capacity to understand God – a kind of spiritual sixth sense.
Barth rejected both those ideas. Scriptural orthodoxy, he thought, had been dealt a fatal blow by the Enlightenment. Of course, scripture was at the center of Christianity, but it wasn’t the hotline to God which many conservative believers claimed it to be. And as for that spiritual sixth sense – well, that suggested that it was humanity which reached out to God. For Barth, that was exactly the wrong way around. We’ll come back to that, though.
Let’s start, instead, by taking a closer look at how the Enlightenment challenged traditional Christianity and what Barth made of that challenge.
---
Immanuel Kant cast a long shadow over Protestant theology.
Thought is historical – it responds to ideas and problems that exist at certain times and in certain places. To understand a thinker like Barth, then, we have to recover the context in which he developed his ideas. And to do that we have to rewind back to the nineteenth century.
Barth was born in Switzerland in 1886. The Barth family was pious and philosophical. His father, Fritz, was a Calvinist theologian, and Karl grew up surrounded by conversations about the great religious debates of the day. In Protestant, German-speaking Europe, those debates were shaped by the legacy of Immanuel Kant, a philosopher whose name was synonymous with the Enlightenment. Kant’s work loomed over Protestant theology, and he was also a formative influence on Barth.
So why was Kant so important to theology? To answer that question, we have to take a brief detour through his ideas. More specifically, we have to take a look at Kant’s theory of knowledge.
What is knowledge? Kant argues that we can’t access reality itself – there’s a world “out there” which we can’t know directly. But we can experience it through our senses. If we only had our senses, we would experience that world as nothing but a chaotic medley of sounds, smells, and sights. But we also have reason, which gives us access to concepts like space and time. When we filter the empirical data from our senses through those concepts, we can make sense of the world. That’s knowledge.
But, Kant continues, the sensory and cognitive tools we use – our senses and our minds – determine what we can know. The laws of physics, for example, are knowable because they can be experienced and because they conform to concepts in our minds like space and time. Newton watched the apple fall and worked out what was going on using those concepts, which are accessible to all humans. If something can’t be experienced and doesn’t conform to such concepts, though, it can’t be known.
For Kant, this second category covers all metaphysical entities, including God. A divine being doesn’t conform to our concepts of space and time – God, after all, is everywhere at all times. Nor do our senses allow us to experience God: we can’t touch or smell the divine. Without such empirically verifiable experience, Kant concludes, dogmatic claims about the existence or nonexistence of God have no rational basis. We can’t know God; we can only believe in God.
Of course, we could also choose to believe in Bigfoot – another idea which can’t be an object of empirical knowledge. But Kant isn’t advocating relativism. God is unknowable, he says, but the idea of a merciful God who commands us to love our neighbors is a useful idea. Unlike a belief in Bigfoot, which is an arbitrary opinion, it’s rational to believe in such a God. His commandments are identical to the moral laws our reason allows us to discover.
To take just one example, reason says an action is only permissible if we can accept that everyone acts the same way. If we can’t accept that, we have encountered a contradiction, which is reason’s way of showing us the limits of moral behavior. The same idea occurs in scripture. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us that the essence of divine law is that we do to others as we would have them do to us. For Kant, these are two routes to the same destination – both reason and religion lead to us morality.
---
Barth accepted one of Kant’s most important ideas – and rejected the rest.
Modern theology, Barth said, started with Kant. What he meant was that theologians after Kant had to reckon with the German philosopher’s ideas.
So what was his legacy? Barth believed Kant had convincingly shown that God can’t be known like other things. That we can’t see, hear, feel, touch, or perceive God. Not because he is invisible or pure spirit, but because he is God. God is the subject – the active creator of all that exists. For that reason, he escapes our grasp and our attempts to make him into an object of knowledge.
In short, for Kant, God is the wholly other. We can’t make substantive claims about God because he can’t be put in a box and defined and analyzed by human reason. Where did that leave theology?
Broadly speaking, there were two camps of post-Kantian theologians. The first said that if we can’t talk about God, we should simply be quiet. To show proper reverence to God, they argued, one ought to stop discussing and arguing and interpreting, and instead ponder the divine in silence.
The second camp took a different approach. Kant, they said, had provided an accurate philosophical system, but he had missed something essential. They called it the religious feeling. This view was associated with liberal Protestant theology and its leading thinker – Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Schleiermacher agreed with Kant that God can’t be an object of knowledge. But we don’t need to know God because we can experience God. How, though? Schleiermacher argued that all humans have a kind of intuitive sixth sense of living in the presence of the divine. Of the absolute. This sense doesn’t have anything to do with cognitive ways of knowing the world. It’s more like the inspiration which seizes an artist when she engages with that world. Every object, and every moment, is a potential source of revelation. We don’t have to be able to make substantive claims about God, then – to seek God is to cultivate this “God-consciousness” and to be completely open to God’s presence.
Barth was deeply influenced by Schleiermacher, but he ultimately rejected this argument. Let’s see if we can determine why using an analogy.
Imagine describing a glorious sunset to a friend. In one sense, you’re talking about all the complex chemical and psychological processes that took place in your eyes, optic nerves, and brain. But to describe the sunset in this highly scientific way would kind of miss the point. What’s really interesting is the reality of the sunset, not your experience of that reality. It’s the real sunset you’re actually trying to talk about. In Barth’s view, Schleiermacher had missed the real thing. He was trying to talk about God but ended up describing the human experience of God.
Put differently, he’d put the cart before the horse. That, Barth thought, was a typical error of liberal theologians. So he parted ways with Schleiermacher. But he didn’t think silence in the face of an unknowable God was the answer, either. Nor could he accept Kant’s view that the ultimate truth of Christian doctrine could be discovered by reasoning humans – that, after all, seemed to imply that humans themselves could directly access the divine. What, then, was his answer?
To get into that, we need to look at the special role revelation plays in Barth’s own theology.
---
Revelation makes the impossible possible.
Let’s stay with that sunset for a moment. Schleiermacher has just given us a vivid description of all the chemical and psychological processes that occurred in his body as he watched the sun set.
OK, Barth says, that’s also how I feel when I see a beautiful sunset. But where do those feelings come from? We could say that we all have an innate sun-consciousness which attunes us to the movements of that star. But isn’t it simpler, and truer, to simply state that the sun itself provoked that experience? Isn’t that what we actually mean to talk about?
By analogy, isn’t it simpler, and truer, to say that faith – the experience of God’s presence – is provoked by God? For Barth, this is of course a rhetorical question. The answer must be, “Yes!”
Faith, then, comes from outside. It isn’t a human matter – it’s God’s way of making himself known. If theologians like Barth dare to talk about God, it’s only because God has spoken to humanity and compelled us to speak. There is nothing in us that leads us toward God – neither reason nor our sense of the divine can bridge the chasm between us and him. God is the wholly other, but he can choose to reveal himself to us. More to the point, he has already chosen to reveal himself to us in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. That’s the miracle to which scripture bears witness.
Barth the Kantian continues to insist that we can’t know God. But Barth the Christian and theologian also insists that the impossibility of knowing God is suspended in revelation. In revelation, God becomes both the object of our knowledge and the subject who makes that knowing possible. He enters into us as the Holy Spirit and creates the faith. Revelation, then, is a relationship between God, who allows us to know him, and humanity, which receives the capacity to know.
That the impossible becomes possible through faith is at the heart of Barth’s understanding of Christianity. When we ask ourselves as humans what is possible, we run up against the limits of our natural understanding of the world. In this world, everything is finite and sinful and there are few grounds for hope. But God’s revelation bursts that apart. The impossible becomes possible; the dead can be resurrected. The impossibility of knowing God, Barth argues, needs to be understood in that light. It becomes possible when the God who raised Jesus from death wills it to be possible.
Here, we return to Barth’s core theme: the limits of humanity. We can’t will revelation – only God has the sovereign freedom to reveal himself to us. Scripture bears witness to the fact that this has already happened at different times and places. Faith means remembering this fact and trusting God’s promise that it will happen again in the future.
---
God reveals himself in the here and now.
At this point, we can circle back to an idea we looked at earlier – the idea that Christianity contains a kernel of universal truth wrapped in a husk of arbitrary doctrine. That was Kant’s position, but it was also a position embraced by many Protestant theologians.
This idea holds that the truth of Christian doctrine can be expressed in many ways. Scripture is just one attempt to grasp such truths. The Bible, then, is a historical document – an attempt to translate universal truths into a language that certain people at a certain time could understand. That means there are other ways of expressing those truths – ways more suited to the rational modern world.
Barth refuses to accept this argument. You can’t strip away the historical husk of Christianity and get at the timeless kernel of truth, he says. That’s like trying to teach someone Chinese by having them read German translations of Chinese books. The essence of Christianity – that which makes it what it is – can only be found in its concrete history. Why is that? To answer this question, we need to dig a little deeper into Barth’s understanding of revelation.
How does God reveal himself? Barth identifies three sources of revelation: Jesus the man, scripture, and preaching. But these aren’t independent and equal sources of revelation; they follow the order in which we’ve just listed them. Let’s break that down.
Barth once said that all his thoughts revolved around a single point: Jesus Christ, who is God revealed in historical time. It’s worth repeating that last bit – in historical time. God has already revealed himself to humans. Humanity’s existence revolves around this point, which divides history into a before and an after. All theology, all scripture, and all preaching by the church exist in that after, too. Christianity’s essence, in short, is the act of bearing witness to this real, historical miracle.
Everything points back to this revelation. When we hear the gospel being preached, the words that fill our ears aren’t the final point of reference. The gospel points beyond itself, to a higher authority, which is the ultimate source of its power. What it points to is the moment God acted for humanity’s salvation in the life, death, and resurrection of his son – Jesus Christ. All revelation, Barth insists, begins with Jesus. Scripture bears witness to this miracle, and the church’s preaching has to orient itself around scripture. All of Christianity’s truths are bound to this revelatory history.
That doesn’t mean that revelation must be spoken of in the past tense, though. Scripture and preaching point back to Jesus, but they are God’s way of speaking to us through living humans.
Here, God, in all his grace, mercy, and power, ceases to be the wholly other. God, Barth says, shows that he is so much God that he can also be not-God. He can descend from his unknowable heights and become something else – something that we can see, hear, feel, touch, and perceive. That “something else” takes three forms: Jesus, scripture, and preaching. Taken together, Barth calls these forms of revelation God’s secondary objectivity – the way in which we can know him.
And this is the miracle of revelation. God assumes the form of something inherently fallible and sinful – something human – so that we can know him. This is God’s way of speaking to us, here and now.
Karl Barth (1886-1968). Protestant theologian, born in Basel, who has been described as ‘the Einstein of twentieth-century theology.’
---
A beginner’s guide to some of Karl Barth’s big ideas.
Many consider Karl Barth to be one of the most important Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. His writings have been characterized as brilliant and creative, and they continue to influence religious thinkers today. On the other hand, he’s also been deemed contradictory, verbose, and frustrating; his unfinished magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, has over 12,000 pages!
This book, though, looks at one of Barth’s much shorter works: God Here and Now, a collection of seven essays and addresses on the gospel, faith, grace, the Bible, the Church, ethics, and humanism. It attempts to distill his complex ruminations into a simple, clear message on what it means to meet God today. We had to look into the Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth occasionally to understand some of the ideas that Barth shares quite implicitly.
---
“God is the wholly other.”
Let’s start at the beginning. What is theology?
Look up the word in a dictionary and you’ll learn that it consists of two parts, both of which are Greek. The first is the noun theos, meaning “God.” Then there’s the suffix, “-logy,” which refers to a body of knowledge. Just as sociology is a body of knowledge about society, theology is a body of knowledge about God. There’s the first part of our answer.
But we can dig a bit deeper. The root of that “-logy” suffix is the Greek verb legein, meaning “to speak.” So there’s the second part of the answer: theology is the act of speaking about God.
And that’s pretty much how the Swiss theologian Karl Barth – the subject of this book– defined it. Theologians, he said, ought to talk about God. Ought, though, presupposes that one can talk about God. As a young man at the beginning of the twentieth century, Barth wasn’t at all sure that was possible. Why not? The long answer is, well, long. Unpacking it will take us to the heart of Barth’s theology – and the end of this book. But here’s the short version.
God, Barth insists, is der ganz Andere – “the wholly other.” God and humanity are entirely different, and the gap between us and the divine is a vast chasm. Simply put, God is heaven – and we are on Earth. We strive to know God, but God is the great unknown. God is neither a substance we can grasp with our worldly senses nor a metaphysical entity alongside other such entities. God stands outside everything because he is the origin of everything that isn’t God.
So where does that leave theology? As Barth saw it, lots of theologians had dodged the all-important question of how flawed humans can talk about a perfect, unknowable God. That dodge usually took one of two forms. They either fell back onto orthodoxy and argued that God was simply knowable through scripture, especially when it was interpreted by experts – theologians. Or they argued that humans had an innate capacity to understand God – a kind of spiritual sixth sense.
Barth rejected both those ideas. Scriptural orthodoxy, he thought, had been dealt a fatal blow by the Enlightenment. Of course, scripture was at the center of Christianity, but it wasn’t the hotline to God which many conservative believers claimed it to be. And as for that spiritual sixth sense – well, that suggested that it was humanity which reached out to God. For Barth, that was exactly the wrong way around. We’ll come back to that, though.
Let’s start, instead, by taking a closer look at how the Enlightenment challenged traditional Christianity and what Barth made of that challenge.
---
Immanuel Kant cast a long shadow over Protestant theology.
Thought is historical – it responds to ideas and problems that exist at certain times and in certain places. To understand a thinker like Barth, then, we have to recover the context in which he developed his ideas. And to do that we have to rewind back to the nineteenth century.
Barth was born in Switzerland in 1886. The Barth family was pious and philosophical. His father, Fritz, was a Calvinist theologian, and Karl grew up surrounded by conversations about the great religious debates of the day. In Protestant, German-speaking Europe, those debates were shaped by the legacy of Immanuel Kant, a philosopher whose name was synonymous with the Enlightenment. Kant’s work loomed over Protestant theology, and he was also a formative influence on Barth.
So why was Kant so important to theology? To answer that question, we have to take a brief detour through his ideas. More specifically, we have to take a look at Kant’s theory of knowledge.
What is knowledge? Kant argues that we can’t access reality itself – there’s a world “out there” which we can’t know directly. But we can experience it through our senses. If we only had our senses, we would experience that world as nothing but a chaotic medley of sounds, smells, and sights. But we also have reason, which gives us access to concepts like space and time. When we filter the empirical data from our senses through those concepts, we can make sense of the world. That’s knowledge.
But, Kant continues, the sensory and cognitive tools we use – our senses and our minds – determine what we can know. The laws of physics, for example, are knowable because they can be experienced and because they conform to concepts in our minds like space and time. Newton watched the apple fall and worked out what was going on using those concepts, which are accessible to all humans. If something can’t be experienced and doesn’t conform to such concepts, though, it can’t be known.
For Kant, this second category covers all metaphysical entities, including God. A divine being doesn’t conform to our concepts of space and time – God, after all, is everywhere at all times. Nor do our senses allow us to experience God: we can’t touch or smell the divine. Without such empirically verifiable experience, Kant concludes, dogmatic claims about the existence or nonexistence of God have no rational basis. We can’t know God; we can only believe in God.
Of course, we could also choose to believe in Bigfoot – another idea which can’t be an object of empirical knowledge. But Kant isn’t advocating relativism. God is unknowable, he says, but the idea of a merciful God who commands us to love our neighbors is a useful idea. Unlike a belief in Bigfoot, which is an arbitrary opinion, it’s rational to believe in such a God. His commandments are identical to the moral laws our reason allows us to discover.
To take just one example, reason says an action is only permissible if we can accept that everyone acts the same way. If we can’t accept that, we have encountered a contradiction, which is reason’s way of showing us the limits of moral behavior. The same idea occurs in scripture. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us that the essence of divine law is that we do to others as we would have them do to us. For Kant, these are two routes to the same destination – both reason and religion lead to us morality.
---
Barth accepted one of Kant’s most important ideas – and rejected the rest.
Modern theology, Barth said, started with Kant. What he meant was that theologians after Kant had to reckon with the German philosopher’s ideas.
So what was his legacy? Barth believed Kant had convincingly shown that God can’t be known like other things. That we can’t see, hear, feel, touch, or perceive God. Not because he is invisible or pure spirit, but because he is God. God is the subject – the active creator of all that exists. For that reason, he escapes our grasp and our attempts to make him into an object of knowledge.
In short, for Kant, God is the wholly other. We can’t make substantive claims about God because he can’t be put in a box and defined and analyzed by human reason. Where did that leave theology?
Broadly speaking, there were two camps of post-Kantian theologians. The first said that if we can’t talk about God, we should simply be quiet. To show proper reverence to God, they argued, one ought to stop discussing and arguing and interpreting, and instead ponder the divine in silence.
The second camp took a different approach. Kant, they said, had provided an accurate philosophical system, but he had missed something essential. They called it the religious feeling. This view was associated with liberal Protestant theology and its leading thinker – Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Schleiermacher agreed with Kant that God can’t be an object of knowledge. But we don’t need to know God because we can experience God. How, though? Schleiermacher argued that all humans have a kind of intuitive sixth sense of living in the presence of the divine. Of the absolute. This sense doesn’t have anything to do with cognitive ways of knowing the world. It’s more like the inspiration which seizes an artist when she engages with that world. Every object, and every moment, is a potential source of revelation. We don’t have to be able to make substantive claims about God, then – to seek God is to cultivate this “God-consciousness” and to be completely open to God’s presence.
Barth was deeply influenced by Schleiermacher, but he ultimately rejected this argument. Let’s see if we can determine why using an analogy.
Imagine describing a glorious sunset to a friend. In one sense, you’re talking about all the complex chemical and psychological processes that took place in your eyes, optic nerves, and brain. But to describe the sunset in this highly scientific way would kind of miss the point. What’s really interesting is the reality of the sunset, not your experience of that reality. It’s the real sunset you’re actually trying to talk about. In Barth’s view, Schleiermacher had missed the real thing. He was trying to talk about God but ended up describing the human experience of God.
Put differently, he’d put the cart before the horse. That, Barth thought, was a typical error of liberal theologians. So he parted ways with Schleiermacher. But he didn’t think silence in the face of an unknowable God was the answer, either. Nor could he accept Kant’s view that the ultimate truth of Christian doctrine could be discovered by reasoning humans – that, after all, seemed to imply that humans themselves could directly access the divine. What, then, was his answer?
To get into that, we need to look at the special role revelation plays in Barth’s own theology.
---
Revelation makes the impossible possible.
Let’s stay with that sunset for a moment. Schleiermacher has just given us a vivid description of all the chemical and psychological processes that occurred in his body as he watched the sun set.
OK, Barth says, that’s also how I feel when I see a beautiful sunset. But where do those feelings come from? We could say that we all have an innate sun-consciousness which attunes us to the movements of that star. But isn’t it simpler, and truer, to simply state that the sun itself provoked that experience? Isn’t that what we actually mean to talk about?
By analogy, isn’t it simpler, and truer, to say that faith – the experience of God’s presence – is provoked by God? For Barth, this is of course a rhetorical question. The answer must be, “Yes!”
Faith, then, comes from outside. It isn’t a human matter – it’s God’s way of making himself known. If theologians like Barth dare to talk about God, it’s only because God has spoken to humanity and compelled us to speak. There is nothing in us that leads us toward God – neither reason nor our sense of the divine can bridge the chasm between us and him. God is the wholly other, but he can choose to reveal himself to us. More to the point, he has already chosen to reveal himself to us in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. That’s the miracle to which scripture bears witness.
Barth the Kantian continues to insist that we can’t know God. But Barth the Christian and theologian also insists that the impossibility of knowing God is suspended in revelation. In revelation, God becomes both the object of our knowledge and the subject who makes that knowing possible. He enters into us as the Holy Spirit and creates the faith. Revelation, then, is a relationship between God, who allows us to know him, and humanity, which receives the capacity to know.
That the impossible becomes possible through faith is at the heart of Barth’s understanding of Christianity. When we ask ourselves as humans what is possible, we run up against the limits of our natural understanding of the world. In this world, everything is finite and sinful and there are few grounds for hope. But God’s revelation bursts that apart. The impossible becomes possible; the dead can be resurrected. The impossibility of knowing God, Barth argues, needs to be understood in that light. It becomes possible when the God who raised Jesus from death wills it to be possible.
Here, we return to Barth’s core theme: the limits of humanity. We can’t will revelation – only God has the sovereign freedom to reveal himself to us. Scripture bears witness to the fact that this has already happened at different times and places. Faith means remembering this fact and trusting God’s promise that it will happen again in the future.
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God reveals himself in the here and now.
At this point, we can circle back to an idea we looked at earlier – the idea that Christianity contains a kernel of universal truth wrapped in a husk of arbitrary doctrine. That was Kant’s position, but it was also a position embraced by many Protestant theologians.
This idea holds that the truth of Christian doctrine can be expressed in many ways. Scripture is just one attempt to grasp such truths. The Bible, then, is a historical document – an attempt to translate universal truths into a language that certain people at a certain time could understand. That means there are other ways of expressing those truths – ways more suited to the rational modern world.
Barth refuses to accept this argument. You can’t strip away the historical husk of Christianity and get at the timeless kernel of truth, he says. That’s like trying to teach someone Chinese by having them read German translations of Chinese books. The essence of Christianity – that which makes it what it is – can only be found in its concrete history. Why is that? To answer this question, we need to dig a little deeper into Barth’s understanding of revelation.
How does God reveal himself? Barth identifies three sources of revelation: Jesus the man, scripture, and preaching. But these aren’t independent and equal sources of revelation; they follow the order in which we’ve just listed them. Let’s break that down.
Barth once said that all his thoughts revolved around a single point: Jesus Christ, who is God revealed in historical time. It’s worth repeating that last bit – in historical time. God has already revealed himself to humans. Humanity’s existence revolves around this point, which divides history into a before and an after. All theology, all scripture, and all preaching by the church exist in that after, too. Christianity’s essence, in short, is the act of bearing witness to this real, historical miracle.
Everything points back to this revelation. When we hear the gospel being preached, the words that fill our ears aren’t the final point of reference. The gospel points beyond itself, to a higher authority, which is the ultimate source of its power. What it points to is the moment God acted for humanity’s salvation in the life, death, and resurrection of his son – Jesus Christ. All revelation, Barth insists, begins with Jesus. Scripture bears witness to this miracle, and the church’s preaching has to orient itself around scripture. All of Christianity’s truths are bound to this revelatory history.
That doesn’t mean that revelation must be spoken of in the past tense, though. Scripture and preaching point back to Jesus, but they are God’s way of speaking to us through living humans.
Here, God, in all his grace, mercy, and power, ceases to be the wholly other. God, Barth says, shows that he is so much God that he can also be not-God. He can descend from his unknowable heights and become something else – something that we can see, hear, feel, touch, and perceive. That “something else” takes three forms: Jesus, scripture, and preaching. Taken together, Barth calls these forms of revelation God’s secondary objectivity – the way in which we can know him.
And this is the miracle of revelation. God assumes the form of something inherently fallible and sinful – something human – so that we can know him. This is God’s way of speaking to us, here and now.
November 1, 2019
This will be my first book of Barth, and certainly not the last. As I was told that it’s better to engage directly with Barth’s thoughts than indirectly, I corroborate this after this reading. Barth is unequivocally among the prominent intellectual theologians in the contemporary world, his style is nonetheless appropriate to the depth of his vision (or God’s vision as he was given to present it), I’d had to re-read entire paragraphs, sometimes I sought help out to understand him. “God Here and Now” works like a condescension of his theology touching the following themes: Humanism (an address delivered during a meeting in Geneva in 1949), the Sovereignty of God’s Word, Free Grace, the Authority and significance of the Bible, the Church and the Ethics.
A particular note about this reading is that so far from engaging the form only, Barth approaches each subject substantially, giving the whole weight of the biblical argument before touching its external manifestations. Thus, the Church is not understood from the reaches of the original greek term “ekklēsia”, but in its actual essence as through the history by “which God allows certain men to live as His friends, as witness of his reconciliation of the world with himself which has already taken place in Jesus Christ….The Church exists by happening”.
Though I diverge with him on some of stances (like the Authority and Significance of the Bible (Chap 4)), Barth is still a worth author to engage with, for his commitment to present the Gospel faithfully (a theology rooted in God’s orignal work), for his love for the Gospel, explicitly clear through the detailed presentation of the wealth of God’s work in humanity, and for his love for others visible in his wide gamut of interests in human affairs in light of the Gospel (chap 7).
I only hope it would be a spiritual refreshing reading as it was for me.
Best regards.
A particular note about this reading is that so far from engaging the form only, Barth approaches each subject substantially, giving the whole weight of the biblical argument before touching its external manifestations. Thus, the Church is not understood from the reaches of the original greek term “ekklēsia”, but in its actual essence as through the history by “which God allows certain men to live as His friends, as witness of his reconciliation of the world with himself which has already taken place in Jesus Christ….The Church exists by happening”.
Though I diverge with him on some of stances (like the Authority and Significance of the Bible (Chap 4)), Barth is still a worth author to engage with, for his commitment to present the Gospel faithfully (a theology rooted in God’s orignal work), for his love for the Gospel, explicitly clear through the detailed presentation of the wealth of God’s work in humanity, and for his love for others visible in his wide gamut of interests in human affairs in light of the Gospel (chap 7).
I only hope it would be a spiritual refreshing reading as it was for me.
Best regards.
October 2, 2022
God has nothing to do with me and God is none of my concern.
Thank you.
Thank you.
October 28, 2023
This feels like a really good primer of Barth's theology and ethics.
February 20, 2015
Generally lightweight, repetitive theology which asserts the primacy of the Bible and the untenability of ex cathedra-type statements. It was cool to see some of Hegel's ideas related to dialectical theology coming up here, buried of course, but Barth tries to reverse the "only individuals before God" idea of Kierkegaard's—that there are only democratic congregations. Similarly, Barth seems to hold something like a positive view of Christianity wherein justice comes about via divine commandment rather than through any sort of synthesis. This is odd, as Barth concludes that one's conscience is the metric by which one assesses one's own actions, seeing ethics as the meter stick of religion (pro Hegel). Barth's dismissal late in the book of agnosticism as a decision not to decide is uncharacteristically selfish; this entire part was a really odd and pretty useless addendum within an on-the-whole uninformative although strikingly well-written book.
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"The Church is threatened. Therefore it needs to be preserved. Preservation of the Church, however, must clearly mean: renewal of its essence as event, renewal of its foundation, renewal of its being gathered together as congregation…If the Church is preserved, if in spite of all it has continuance in time, then that must mean that it experiences anew, again and again, the same thing which it experienced in coming into existence, an eternally new reformation which corresponds to its formation." pg. 75
"I conclude with a word of the Apostle Paul from his second letter to the Corinthians (5:19-20): "For God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not reckoning to them their sins, and has delivered to us the word of reconciliation. So we are but Christ's ambassadors, for God exhorts you by means of us. So now on behalf of Christ we ask of you: Let yourselves be reconciled with God." That is the whole of Christian ethics."pg. 93
"In our search for the new humanism was the issue of the survival and contemporary role of so-called "classical" humanism, that is of classical Western humanism, of that humanism which the Dictionnaire de l' Académie francaise—obviously reflecting certain phenomena of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries—defines as "a cultivation of spirit and soul, which comes from familiarity with classical literature, notably Greek and Roman"…"
pg. 95
"The gospel, however, is neither a principle, nor a system, nor a point of view, nor a moral philosophy. It is spirit and life, a good message of God's presence and work in Jesus Christ."
pg. 101
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"The Church is threatened. Therefore it needs to be preserved. Preservation of the Church, however, must clearly mean: renewal of its essence as event, renewal of its foundation, renewal of its being gathered together as congregation…If the Church is preserved, if in spite of all it has continuance in time, then that must mean that it experiences anew, again and again, the same thing which it experienced in coming into existence, an eternally new reformation which corresponds to its formation." pg. 75
"I conclude with a word of the Apostle Paul from his second letter to the Corinthians (5:19-20): "For God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not reckoning to them their sins, and has delivered to us the word of reconciliation. So we are but Christ's ambassadors, for God exhorts you by means of us. So now on behalf of Christ we ask of you: Let yourselves be reconciled with God." That is the whole of Christian ethics."pg. 93
"In our search for the new humanism was the issue of the survival and contemporary role of so-called "classical" humanism, that is of classical Western humanism, of that humanism which the Dictionnaire de l' Académie francaise—obviously reflecting certain phenomena of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries—defines as "a cultivation of spirit and soul, which comes from familiarity with classical literature, notably Greek and Roman"…"
pg. 95
"The gospel, however, is neither a principle, nor a system, nor a point of view, nor a moral philosophy. It is spirit and life, a good message of God's presence and work in Jesus Christ."
pg. 101
April 5, 2015
Reading Barth for the first time outside of a university setting, beyond a passage or two, was very interesting. On opening this book, I didn't realise how conservative Barth was. I expected many things to be questioned and tested in this book but his faith was not one of them.
Although reading Barth can be grinding, I did have some A-HA moments. These mainly occurred in the chapters on the Church and Christian Ethics. I particularly rejoiced when he highlighted the hierarchy of the Church and the authorities in it as invalid to the Word of the Lord where only the whole congregation can be a Church.
There were also some moving thoughts in the Ethics section that I enjoyed, particularly those around God's grace and overall equality among humankind.
I only give it two stars because there is no denying it was hard going, often unnecessarily so.
Although reading Barth can be grinding, I did have some A-HA moments. These mainly occurred in the chapters on the Church and Christian Ethics. I particularly rejoiced when he highlighted the hierarchy of the Church and the authorities in it as invalid to the Word of the Lord where only the whole congregation can be a Church.
There were also some moving thoughts in the Ethics section that I enjoyed, particularly those around God's grace and overall equality among humankind.
I only give it two stars because there is no denying it was hard going, often unnecessarily so.
April 23, 2011
Didn't understand all of it but think I caught some very vigorous ideas here. The one I like the most or at least remember best post-read is that of the church meaning in the original word 'ecclesia' the "event of its congregating" as opposed to referring to a specific institution or other. The event of congregating -- coming together to share together the experience of God.
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