Portrait des Theologen Karl Barth in Basel. Photographie 1956. Portrait of the theologian Karl Barth in Basel. Photography. 1956.
I was chided back in the day by some Princeton Theological Seminary, at that point, MDiv students (who now have their PhDs from the same school), by referring to Scripture as containing biblical revelation; and this with Barth’s theology as the broader background. These guys asserted that Barth would never refer to the Bible as containing “revelation” of God. And yet clearly these lads had never really even read Barth in depth. Barth’s doctrine of the Threefold Form of the Word notwithstanding, he wrote the following in an affirming way:
. . . for we differentiate between the God who sustains the creature and a mere supreme being, identifying that sustaining God with the God of the biblical revelation. . .. -Barth, CD, III/3 §49, 58 [emphasis mine]
To be sure Barth’s theory of revelation was grounded in the Logos of God, Jesus Christ, as the material and formal reality of Holy Scripture’s attestation. Even so, Barth in his Church Dogmatics, as the above attests, does not shrink back from using the phraseology of “biblical revelation” when referring to Holy Scripture. These PTS Barthians would have done well to read Barth at length, rather than simply spot reading him for research purposes.