Per Caritatem

“Karl Barth turned to the book of Romans in the hope of hearing the Word of God and in the hope of finding a new starting-point, and principle, for theology. Instead of interpreting the Bible as an expression of human religious experience, as was typical of theological liberalism, Barth turned to scripture not so much to discover God but to be discovered by God. Whereas ‘religion’ concerns humanity’s search for God, the message of Christianity was, for Barth, that God ‘found the way to us’. God is not an ‘object’ of human reflection but an active subject. Theology’s task therefore is not to formulate human thoughts about God but to explicate God’s thoughts about us. The challenge for Barth was to affirm the reality and activity of God while at the same time forestalling its becoming an object of human historical or rational investigation. If God is God, he must remain free to make himself known. [...] Historical critics, he says, are not critical enough; they do not penetrate as far as the text’s distinctive and unique subject-matter. They do not perceive ‘what there is’ or ‘what stands’ in the Bible. The meaning of the words in the biblical text can only be determined in relation to the Sache of which they speak. To read for the human author’s intention fails to do justice to the freedom of God’s Word speaking in scripture. Schleiermacher, in suggesting that the Bible was an expression of human experience, got the subject-matter exactly the wrong way round. Barth’s aim, in his own words, was to bring the reader ‘face to face with the subject-matter of the Scriptures.’[1]The subject-matter of scripture is not merely history, a system of morality, or religious piety but the God of the gospel: the message of what God was and is doing in Jesus Christ for the sake of a fallen world. This is a crucial point, for it is the driving assumption and material insight behind Barth’s biblical hermeneutics. The subject-matter of theology is not merely historical but eschatological: the ‘world of the text’ (Ricoeur) is the ‘world of God’. The Bible is about the breaking-in of God’s world (the ‘kingdom of God’; ‘real history’) into the world order (‘so-called history’) in order to judge the world and renew it. However, though God enters the world he continues to remain God; he is in the world but not of it. By the very nature of the case, then, this subject-matter is not under human control. God’s self revelation is not a matter of ‘clear and distinct ideas’, but of God-in-communicative action.  ‘Real history’ – the time and space of God’s making himself known – is beyond the reach of the historian. The Sache of the Bible is not an object at our disposal. Interpreters are not merely ‘spectators’ of God’s Word but, in God’s grace, participants that may be caught up into the subject-matter (viz., the fellowship creating triune economy).”

(Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the ‘Miracle’ of Understanding,” pp. 11-13).

Notes

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[1] Barth, The Epistle to the Romans trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933; repr. Oxford, 1968), p. x.