Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation: Recalling the Scottish Confession of 1560 by Karl Barth
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The Very Strange Faith of Our Fathers

Christian thinking about things divine is based primarily not on the recorded words of Jesus or the observations of those who knew him, but on the writings of St. Paul who never met the man. On the face of it, these Pauline writings are certainly innovative; but they are also frequently confusing and contradictory, particularly on the subject which Paul identifies as the distinguishing character of what became known as Christianity: Faith.

Although central to Christian identity, the Pauline idea of faith itself received little sustained attention until the 5th century when Augustine of Hippo made it a focus of his theology. Augustine started a line of thinking that was picked up by Luther and Calvin during the Reformation of the 16th century*, assimilated by the Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, in the 19th century, and passed along to the most influential theologian of the 20th century: the Swiss Protestant Reformed pastor, Karl Barth.

Barth was arguably the first thinker to take Paul entirely seriously, contradictions and all. For Barth, these contradictions are not mistakes, or mysteries to be reconciled. They are the essence, the core, of Christianity. They are what distinguishes Christianity from any other religion. Indeed, Barth has claimed that Christianity does not belong in the category of religion at all. It is sui generis, that is, a mode of being that is unique in human existence. He gives a name to the kind of theology that Paul presents: Dialectical. For him the contradictions of this theology are its most important elements.

The Knowledge of God and the Service of God is composed from Barth’s Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1936/37. These lectures are a summary of his enormous, and enormously influential, 14 volume Church Dogmatics. Arguably, nothing approaching this work had been published since Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theoligicae in the 13th century. And not even Aquinas treated the matter of Pauline faith as thoroughly as Barth.

Their sheer scope and complexity prohibits an adequate review of Barth’s ideas, even in the condensed form of The Knowledge of God and the Service of God. Nevertheless it seems to me appropriate to state some of his headline conclusions in order to demonstrate just how radical - and patently anti-human and irrational - the Pauline idea of faith actually is. I suggest keeping in mind that these ideas, which Barth brings to their logical conclusion, are the basis for what has come to be called European civilization. For me, this is hardly an endorsement of either the purported civilization or Paul’s theology.

Faith Has Nothing To Do With Belief

According to Barth, as it was to Paul, Augustine, and Calvin, human beings are inherently corrupt, not just in what they do, but also in how they think. To think means to use language to articulate things called beliefs. These are man-made artifacts and are inherently erroneous. The concept of belief is therefore un-Christian and must not be confused with faith, which he takes to be almost a sort of Islamic submission to the divine.

Faith Is Something That Happens... Or Not

There is no alternative here but to quote Barth: “Faith is not an art. Faith is not an achievement. Faith is not a good work of which some may boast while others can excuse themselves with a shrug of the shoulders for not being capable of it. It is a decisive insight of faith itself that all of us are incapable of faith in ourselves, whether we think of its preparation, beginning, continuation, or completion.” This is about as close as one can get to pinning Barth down about the matter. In this obscurity he is certainly emulating Paul. But then again he has already established the unreliability of words, and human communication more generally.

Through Faith, There Is No Truth

Barth appears as a radical post-modernist, which he is in many ways. Once again it is necessary to give a short citation: "The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths." This is congruent with Barth’s view of the un-reformable corruption of human reason. Thought must always be suspect. Therefore any conclusions arrived at through thought - truths - are unreliable. The fact that Barth arrives at this truth through his own dialectical reasoning might give one pause for thought; but not Barth. The very attempt to know God through thought is for him impiety.

Scripture Is an Unreliable Guide To Faith

For Barth, divine revelation must not be confused with the ‘forms’ through which it appears. “The Bible is God's Word…” says Barth, “so far as God speaks through it.” But it is unclear when God is speaking and when human beings are creating misleading words about The Word. Trying to sift through scripture to determine what is ‘authentic’ and what merely human arrogance is an impertinent as well as an hopeless task. As fallible human beings we are simply un-equipped to do this, just as the scriptural authors were un-equipped to censor themselves. In his dialectical thought, scripture obscures the Word of God as much as it reveals it.

There Is No Way To Distinguish Revelation From Religious Hearsay

Not only is scripture somewhat iffy as a guidebook to faith, but the “decisive insight of faith” which might be experienced by an individual could as well be a delusion. In effect it’s not clear whether it’s the divine or the devil calling out for recognition. In a sense this is encouraging since the point of view calls for humility on the part of any Christian. After all he or she can’t ever be certain of their spiritual condition. On the other hand, in typical dialectical fashion, such a presumption makes faith the equivalent of uncertainty. One does get the sense that the result of Barth’s dialectic is not the possibility of a creative synthesis, but the inevitability of +1 and -1 totaling 0.

There are many more, dare one say it, unexpected conclusions which emerge from Barth’s Pauline theology. They have been the focus of academic discussion and practical pastoral development for almost a century. Barth’s consistent theme throughout is the “impossible possibility” of knowing anything about God at all. Based on Paul’s logic of faith, Barth has demonstrated for all who want to see, how that logic leads not to confidence, trust, and certainly not to faith in divine providence but inevitably to human hopelessness.

To be clear: I have no problem with dialectics. Seriously considering radically opposed alternatives can lead to creative insight. And I do in fact agree with Barth that there are some things which are beyond the capacity of human intelligence. “What is the purpose of the universe?” is a question, for example, which will never be answered. That doesn’t imply that the question is meaningless - some wonderful poetry has been produced in response to it. But the unanswerability does suggest that when one has only irrational nonsense to contribute, one holds one’s dialectical tongue.

Barth’s theology is not one of slaves who might hope for un-merited favour from the slave-master as described by Nietzsche. Nor does it imply any sort of ethical mutual concern which might have divine sanction as suggested by the liberal Social Gospellers.** It is a theology of the bus stop in which one is required to wait patiently for the Number 14 which was in fact taken out of service last week. As my grand-daughter would say: It is crazy-making. Nothing more is really necessary to demonstrate the vacuous nature of Pauline Christianity than where it has ended up - whether one has faith or not.

*For more on the controversy about faith during the Reformation see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

** For more on Barthian ethics, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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