The Spirit of God and the Christian Life

Reconstructing Karl Barth's Pneumatology

JinHyok Kim

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781451470260
• eBook ISBN: 9781451479812
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Theologian Robert Jenson once titled an essay on Karl Barth's doctrine of the Holy Spirit, "You Wonder Where the Spirit Went, " claiming that, for all the talk of the Spirit, Barth's theology was more nearly binitarian than Trinitarian. That assessment has largely carried the day and set the paradigm for interpretation. JinHyok Kim directly challenges the prevailing paradigm, reconstructing Barth's pneumatology and proposing the possible contours it would have taken in the final volumes of Church Dogmatics left incomplete at Barth's death. Within this reconstruction, Kim explores the contexts of Barth's work and demonstrates the connection of Barth's doctrine of the Spirit with the realities and practices of the Christian life. Here a new standard for understanding Barth's Trinitarian theology, particularly his doctrine of the Spirit, opens up and offers a fresh reading of an important topic in one of the central thinkers of modern theology.

4

The Spirit and the Revelation of the Word of God

“If I understand what I am trying to do in the Church Dogmatics, it is to listen to what Scripture is saying and tell you what I hear.”^[1] This simple sentence was Barth’s response to his students’ hours of heated and sophisticated debate about their teacher’s theological method. This short answer involves central issues of his theology in general and his doctrine of revelation in particular. In other words, he attempted to hear God’s Word through the Bible and to witness this subject matter through his writing and sermons. By what right, then, did he claim that he heard something (or someone) from Scriptures? To restate the welter of his complex theological argument in the simplest terms possible, it is the Spirit who allows, persuades, and convinces humanity in a gift of faith to receive God’s revelation in Jesus Christ through Scripture and proclamation.

The purpose of this chapter is to explicate Barth’s doctrine of revelation with special attention to its pneumatological implications. More specifically, it will demonstrate that the Spirit’s mediation is particularly significant for enabling human beings to experience and to talk about God. Barth often posed a simple but pregnant question: When human beings read the Bible, or hear proclamations, how dare they regard human words as God’s Word? Barth claimed: “This means that I come up against a barrier. I do not hear God himself speak. I only hear from God and about God. His own Word comes to me only in this broken form.”^[2] The fragmentary character of revelation, nevertheless, cannot cancel God’s togetherness with humankind. This unique relationship, Barth proposed, should be conceived by a particular “logic of revelation,” and the investigation of this specific logic is a main task of the doctrine of revelation. In this logic, the difference between God’s Word and human words is not simple opposition. It is christologically structured in God’s act of coming to the world in Christ. The hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in Christ is the place where the encounter between the divine Word and human words can be properly observed. It follows that the Spirit, who unites Christ’s divinity and humanity, also plays a vital role in revelation by mediating between divine and human language. My study suggests, therefore, that Barth’s christocentric approach leaves room for reflecting the Spirit’s work.

Each section of this chapter will investigate crucial pneumatological themes in Barth’s doctrine of revelation. The first section will examine the way in which the Spirit mediates between divine and human logic. The second section will be devoted to the transition from the past revelatory event in Christ to the reality of revelation here and now in the Spirit. The third section will study Barth’s attempt to rehabilitate a proper theology of experience by invocating the Spirit as the Lord of experience. The fourth section, finally, will analyze Barth’s deeply pneumatological doctrine of spiritual-corporeal perception of God. These sections will also show that, instead of general cognitive capacity, prayer is presented as the basis for integrating human acknowledgment of God’s revelation with active response to it in everyday life.

1. The Spirit’s Mediation between Divine-Logic
and Human-Logic

This section will demonstrate that one of the main roles of the Spirit in Barth is as the mediator between God and humanity in the event of revelation.^[3] The pneumatological dimension of revelation in Barth will be examined in each subsection with slightly different perspectives and emphases. First, I will analyze the way Barth diagnosed and reacted to the problem of a theology of the Word in the post-Kantian theological trajectories. Second, I will explicate how Barth’s notion of primary and secondary objectivity subverted the modern epistemological framework of subject and object. Third, I will show the way in which Barth’s emphasis upon the mystery of God’s Word results in his unique vision of the Christian life under the Spirit. Fourth, and finally, I will investigate the relationship between pneumatology and theological language in Barth. It should be noted here, as significant research has already demonstrated, that the doctrine of revelation is particularly central to Barth in the 1920s and in the 1930s.^[4] My study also mainly focuses on Barth’s writings in these periods.

1.1. Revelation and Reason: The Doctrine of Revelation
in the Shadow of Kant

It is not hard to find substantial previous research on Barth’s doctrine of revelation. As Christopher Asprey’s nuanced study illustrates, however, few scholars have observed that Barth’s doctrine of revelation is not merely about theological epistemology, but mainly about God’s interaction with humanity.^[5] This subsection will show that Barth’s view of revelation was shaped in and through his reaction to the nineteenth century’s conception of revelation. Barth pointed out that “[t]he time of Schleiermacher and his followers is all too strongly related to our own time; their problems, questions and answers reach all too openly into our own.”^[6] Nevertheless, I will begin with Barth’s appropriation of Kant, not Schleiermacher, because in Barth’s view, Schleiermacher’s achievement emerged from Kant’s introduction of the Copernican worldview into philosophy and theology.^[7]

It may be fair to say that Barth’s reading of Kant was influenced, and thus somewhat misled, by his theological concerns.^[8] Nevertheless, his serious struggle with Kant allowed him to see what Kantian scholars might easily overlook. For example, Heinz Cassirer, a well-known translator and interpreter of Kant, once said, “Why is it that this Swiss theologian understands Kant far better than any philosopher I have come across?”^[9] What made Cassirer prize Barth’s reading of Kant? One may discover that the notion of limit lies at the heart of Barth’s interpretation of Kant. Barth defined the eighteenth century not as the age of reason, a conventional label for this period, but as the age of absolutism, which reduced nearly every discipline, including anthropology, politics, economics, and aesthetics, to an absolute form, or to mathematical relations, in the interests of controlling the outer world.^[10] Absolutism even incorporated God into the realm of human self-awareness, thereby leading Christianity to seek anthropological foundations to speak about its subject matter.

In Barth’s eyes, however, there were two great figures in this age who rediscovered the significance of limit—Mozart and Kant. Barth observed parallels between them as follows: “In Kant’s philosophy, as in the music of Mozart, there is something of calm and majesty of death which seems suddenly to loom up from afar to oppose the eighteent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Prayer, the Spirit, and Redemption
• The Spirit and the Drama of Salvation in History
• The Spirit and the Revelation of the Word of God
• The Spirit and the Beauty of the Lord
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index