Karl Barth: “Dogmatics in Outline” – Faith as Knowledge, God in the Highest, God the Father

In these three chapters Barth lectures through another way to define faith, the uniqueness of God in the Highest, and the unity of God the father as One triune God.

Faith as knowledge is a way of Barth saying that our faith is concerned with language that is not arbitrary, but is concerned with the truth based on reason.  Since the central object of Christianity is the Word, the Logos becoming human, then our faith must be “thoroughly logical.”  Furthermore, it is not the creaturely task to construct this knowledge or conception of the divine for in Barth’s view we only know about God when God so chooses to reveal God’s self to humanity.  It is through this experience of revelation that humanity should know anything about God.  Barth describes the task of a human limited in reason being able to think of the most supreme being imaginable will never have anything to do with God.  Only when God through God’s freedom chooses to reveal something about Godself are we able to know about God.  

Barth continues to say that even though Christian thinkers have been wrong to be in opposition to reason, Christian knowledge is different than science.  To describe these differences Barth pulls from the Hebrew understanding of wisdom (sophia).  This light that illuminates all paths, the knowledge of ourselves and everything being in God, can only be understand through revelation and not through creaturely effort.

In the next chapter Barth describes “God in the Highest” as a testament to the ways in which we utter the word God not as an instance among the general, but as a unique and true God of the Israelites.  Barth states that this “God in the Highest” is distinctly other (in other words, the creed is not a complete understanding of God, but an utterance of the creaturely still on a journey towards unfolding truth).  

This Christian God, according to the Holy Scriptures, is not a God that keeps Himself distance, not involved, or not concerned.  The Christian narrative instead reveals a God who chose to make a small community in Asia Minor God’s people, became those people, became a small baby in a manger, and then died on a Cross.  This Logos, this God in the Highest, is the God of the Christian story, the King of the Universe.

In the next chapter Barth starts to address the trinity.  How do we understand God as One, not separate, but Triune.  God becoming God in three different ways that create one unity?  According to Barth, God did not create Himself, but established Himself nor did God create the Son but is the Son, and therefore is the divine “father” of humanity.  Barth goes onto say that it is in the meeting of the Father and the Son that is the origin of the Holy Spirit and the reason why the Trinity is a union, not at separation.

***NOTE:  In these reflections I am trying to use the language of Barth, though I steer away at points.  I am using the word “creature” to use Barth’s reference for humans though currently I am not a big fan of this language.  I also am trying to understand the ways in which Barth uses terms like  Him, Himself, Father, etc. while I am convinced of the violence committed towards women that is justified by scripture and patriarchal patterns in society.  I try hard (I think) in my transformational experience as a Christian male to open myself to a reality where women are able to define their own experience as agents of influence and change.