I think sometimes folks aren’t appreciating the rub between what Barth (Torrance et al.) are doing when they offer an alternative—to classical theism—theory knowledge of God. It orbits around a question; a question Keith Johnson articulates with great clarity:
Romans I
Barth began concentrated study on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans a few months after delivering ‘The Righteousness of God’. The experience was slow-going, at least by the standards of his later output. The extra time spent on the manuscript, however, meant that Barth’s understanding of the distinctions and categories that had been working subtly throughout ‘The Righteousness of God’ had time to develop and mature to the point where they could become more prominent and central to his theology. We see the fruit of this development in the final manuscript of the first edition of Barth’s commentary on Romans. One of Barth’s concerns as he works through Paul’s text is to explain how the relationship between God and humanity can be a relationship-in-distinction. His goal, as becomes clear in the text, is to find a way to remove the human consciousness from the centre of our understanding of the creator-creature relationship while also upholding some way of talking about true human knowledge of God. Barth is convinced that human knowledge of God cannot be conceived as something constant or always available—since this leaves it under human control—but rather, it must be understood as something that comes afresh and anew in each moment. But what does this kind of knowledge look like in practical terms? In other words, how can one see God as, on the one hand, existing prior to and apart from all human knowledge of him, and, on the other, as one who really is known by the human?1
Before further comment, one point of quibble. When Johnson writes: “Barth is convinced that human knowledge of God cannot be conceived as something constant or always available . . .” it almost leaves one with the impression that knowledge of God for Barth, theoretically, isn’t ‘always available.’ Of course, the rest of the context from Johnson helps to clarify, but I think this could “sound” a certain way for the casual reader. It isn’t that, for Barth, knowledge of God isn’t always available, it’s just that the way it’s always available comes from the miracle of God’s irrupting grace into our lives moment by moment, afresh anew. And this gets us to the point: as Johnson is eloquently developing, Barth is intentionally operating with a non-possessive or dispossessive theory of knowledge of God. Instead of the ‘classical’ model wherein ‘grace perfects nature,’ thus collapsing grace into nature, for Barth, and I think the Apostle Paul, grace is a constantly in-breaking reality into the lives of Christians in particular, and the world in general. It isn’t something, but someOne, Jesus Christ, who by the Holy Spirit confronts, contradicts, and challenges the would-be knower of God to know God on God’s terms, and not the abstract human agent’s terms. This is implicit in what Johnson is after: i.e. the critique of the classical theist notion that as corollary with its actus purus (pure being) God, there is a natura pura (pure nature) operative such that grace becomes the natural predicate or end of nature’s perfection independent of the immediacy and agency of God; something like a ‘deistic’ notion of a God-world relation wherein God relates to the ‘pure world’ mediated through secondary and middle causative powers (decrees etc.) at a ‘distance.’ When this is applied to a theory of knowledge of God, knowledge of God becomes immediate and ‘constant’ to the human agent in abstraction from God, per se, and instead in concreto by way of the creature’s active accessing of the created order as a vestige by which God is known (from effect to cause in a chain of being).
Barth, as Johnson is underscoring, is registering a resounding: Nein! For Barth, nature presents no independent access to God, even through a ‘created grace’ provided for ostensibly by God. For Barth, the created order is so befuddled by sin, that in order for it to be redeemed, it must be re-created. But this requires a miracle from the type of resources that only God has available to Him; which we see in creatio ex nihilo. As such, knowledge of God can only be provided for by God of God; not by way of an abstract accessing of vestiges of God woven into the taxis of the fallen created order, but by way of God’s re-created order in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is only through a relation of faith, the faith of Christ for us, that this knowledge of God can obtain. Only after God has thought Himself for us in Jesus Christ, wooed us into His womb through participation with the Son’s humanity, that the human comes into the center of God’s inner-life and theological knowledge of God obtains (from the evangelical to the theological, as TF Torrance would say it). But this an ongoing miracle of God’s parousia, of God visiting us moment by moment in the freshness of the breath of the Holy Spirit as He enlivens Christ’s voice into ours. This naturally leads to witness. Knowledge of God for Barth reduces to witness insofar as this is the organic unfolding of the Christian’s knowledge of God. The point being that human agents cannot think God in abstraction from God on their own created energy, since such energy is fallen energy that required a total scrapping, which occurred in the incarnation and the cross of Jesus Christ. There is a new way, a new creation, a new time that Christian’s bear witness to: the Kingdom has come, is coming moment by moment, and is to come in its eschatological bliss of the many finally seeing their One, the One for them, God in Jesus Christ.
As Johnson leaves us with, what Barth is left with is how to think God, and knowledge of God under his proposed terms, in such a way that the Godness of God’s transcendence, His hiddenness (Deus absconditus), becomes accessible to the creature; accessible in a way that retains the integrity of God’s Godness, and the creature’s creatureliness. The answer is always Jesus; what’s the question?
1 Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analgia Entis (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 21-2.