Divine Revelation and Human Practice

Responsive and Imaginative Participation

Clark

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781498270434
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

In this creative contribution to the doctrine of revelation, Clark seeks to develop and articulate an understanding of God's self-disclosure located in the participation of the ecclesial community in the trinitarian life of God. Clark takes as his point of departure Karl Barth's doctrine of the Word of God. Barth has impressed upon theology that revelation is primarily an event in which God establishes relationship with humanity in an act of his sovereign freedom. But what is the role of human participation in this revelatory event? It is here that Barth's account is less than satisfactory, and this shortcoming points to the principal theme of the book. Addressing this theme, Clark engages with the work of Michael Polanyi, whose philosophy provides a potent resource for the task. One profoundly innovative aspect of Polanyi's work is his theory of tacit knowledge, which demonstrates how articulate knowledge (conceptual understanding) arises out of knowledge established through practical and intrinsically imaginative participation in particular practices or life-ways. Although we depend upon such knowledge, we can articulate it only in part. We know more than we can tell. This insight has profound implications for the doctrine of revelation. It suggests that knowledge of God is necessarily bound up with the various practices of the church in which Christians are imaginatively engaged and through which God makes himself known. It also suggests that such knowledge cannot be fully articulated. Clark does not deny the possibility or the importance of doctrinal formulation, but he does issue a reminder that theological statements are only possible because God gives himself to be known in the life and practices of the church.This substantial work provides important and original proposals for rearticulating the doctrine of revelation.

CHAPTER 1

An Exposition of Karl Barth’s

Doctrine of Revelation

Introduction

In the introduction to his book Christology, Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes an observation that is indicative of some of the central themes that will unfold in this and the subsequent chapters. He writes:

Teaching about Christ begins in silence. “Be still, for that is the absolute,” writes Kierkegaard. That has nothing to do with the silence of the mystics, who in their dumbness chatter away secretly in their souls by themselves. The silence of the Church is silence before the Word. In so far as the Church proclaims the Word, it falls down silently in truth before the inexpressible: “In silence I worship before the unutterable” (Cyril of Alexandria).1

In making this comment, Bonhoeffer strikes at the heart of what ought properly to be said of revelation. We must begin with something that is given to us. We do not start with ourselves—with our religious views or spiritual experience—but with the Word that enters the sphere of our existence. This is an event that does not happen at our bidding, but in the freedom of God. The Word is God in person: the transcendent one.

This Word—the Logos—cannot be circumscribed, defined or captured in any human scheme of categorization (human “logoi”) because it is a reality that transcends the human sphere in which these schemes are founded and established. Thus, to every human logos the Word is the “counterlogos,” and as such, it calls all forms of human classification (and the forms of life in which they are established) into question.

Bonhoeffer goes on to point to the paradox that it is precisely this Word (which he calls “inexpressible”) that must be proclaimed by the church. Even as the church proclaims this Word, Bonhoeffer claims, it remains inexpressible. The church can speak of the Word, but its words cannot encompass the reality of which it speaks. The presence of the Word in the church is an ineffable presence. It can transform the life and the speech of the congregation, but it cannot be assimilated, possessed, or demarcated.

Bonhoeffer writes: “to speak of Christ will be . . . to speak in the silent places of the Church. In the humble silence of the worshipping congregation we concern ourselves with christology.”2 Christology may be taught in the academy, but the reality of which the theologian speaks is the reality that confronts the church in its prayer and worship. On the one hand, we are concerned with the objectivity and inexpressibility of the Word that is given to the worshipping community of the church, and, on the other, with the church’s commission to proclaim this Word. This is the paradox that must shape ecclesial life, practice, and self-understanding.

These themes will never be far from view in the following exposition of Karl Barth’s understanding of the Word of God.

The Nature of the Word of God

“[T]he reality in which the New Testament sees God’s revelation taking place is utterly simple, the simple reality of God.”3 It is Barth’s belief that in revelation God is present, and is present in his freedom. In a statement reminiscent of Bonhoeffer’s, Barth writes: “[W]e must first understand the reality of Jesus Christ as such, and then by reading from the tablet of this reality, understand the possibility involved in it, the freedom of God, established and maintained in it, to reveal Himself in precisely this reality and not otherwise, and so the unique possibility which we have to respect as divine necessity.”4

The revelation of God is not God’s answer to the religious questioning of humanity. In revelation humanity is confronted with the reality of God. This confrontation is God’s decision and God’s act, and there is no possibility of such a revelation for humanity apart from this decision and act of God. Nevertheless, “real revelation puts man in God’s presence.”5 This is the gift of God’s self-presentation to humanity; but because it is God’s decision, in which a human decision has no part in it, it is a decision that God makes in freedom.

Consequently, Barth is able to say:

When revelation takes place, it never does so by our insight and skill, but in the freedom of God to be free for us and to free us from ourselves, that is to say, to let His light shine in our darkness, which as such does not comprehend His light. In this miracle, which we can only acknowledge as having occurred, which we can only receive from the hand of God as it takes place by His hand, His kingdom comes for us, and this world passes for us.6

It is received “as it takes place.” This is important for Barth. Revelation is not a commodity that passes from God to the person; it is the reality of God that becomes present to the person. It is an event. Barth says: “This is something God Himself must constantly tell us afresh.”7 He further asserts that “there is no human knowing that corresponds to this divine telling.”8 In this “divine telling,” there is an encounter: there is a human-divine fellowship, but God does not give himself to humanity as a possession. Rather, there is a fresh divine telling. It is out of the encounter of these events that we must speak.

Because we are concerned with an event in which humanity is encountered, we can say what God’s Word is, but we can only say this indirectly: “We must remember the forms in which it is real for us and learn from these forms how it is. This How is the attainable human reflection of the unattainable divine What. Our concern here must be with this reflection.”9

The distinction here is a crucial one. Insofar as we are dealing with “this reflection,” we are dealing with what can be said on the human side of the event of God actually speaking. The Word of God does, indeed, mean that God speaks. And, in view of this, Barth says: “For all its human inadequacy, for all the brokenness with which alone human statements can correspond to the nature of the Word of God, this statement does correspond to the possibility which God has chosen and actualised at all events in His Church.”10

There is, in all forms of the Word of God, what Barth describes as an upper and lower aspect. First, there is the spiritual nature of the Word of God, as distinct from naturalness, or its nature as a physical event. Secondly, however, the Word of God is also natural and physical. Without this it would not be the Word of God that is directed to humanity. Were it not for this aspect, there would be no possibility of speaking of human participation in revelation.

God speaks to humanity because he chooses to, and not because he needs to. There is a distinction between what God says to himself and what he says to humanity. Barth states “What . . . [God] says by Himself and to Himself from eternity to eternity would really be said just as well and even better without our being there, as speech that for us would be eternal silence. Only when we are clear about this can we estimate what it means that God has actually, though not necessarily, created a world and us, that His love actually, though not necessarily, applies to us, that...