Karl Barth - Dogmatics in Outline Ch. 4

Christian faith is a decision. This is where we have to begin, and wish to begin. Christian faith, to be sure, is an event in the mystery between God and man; the event of the freedom in which God acts towards this man, and of the freedom which God gives this man. But this does not exclude, but actually includes the fact that where there is faith in the sense of the Christian Creed, history is taking place, that there something is being undertaken, completed and carried out in time by man. Faith is God’s mystery breaking forth; faith is God’s freedom and man’s freedom in action. Where nothing occurred – in time, of course, that is, occurred visibly and audibly – there would be no faith either. For Christian faith is faith in God, and when the Christian Confession names God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, it is pointing to the fact that in His inner life and nature God is not dead, not passive, not inactive, but that God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit exist in an inner relationship and movement, which may very well be described as a story, as an event. God Himself is not suprahistorical, but historical. And this God has in Himself made a decree, an eternal decree, upon which everything rests of which the Confession of Faith speaks. Our fathers called it the decree of creation and of the covenant and of redemption. This decree of God was carried out in time, once for all, in the work and in the word of Jesus Christ, to which Article II of the Confession bears concrete testimony, ‘who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. . . .’ Faith is man’s answer to this historical existence and nature and action of God. Faith has to do with the God who is in Himself historical and has fashioned a decree whose goal is history, and has set this history going and completed it. Christian faith which was not itself history would not be Christian faith, not faith in . . . Where there is Christian faith there arises and grows an historical form, there arises among men, among contemporaries and non-contemporaries, a community, a togetherness, a brotherhood. But by means of this community, we inevitably reach, at the point where faith is Christian, a human proclamation and message as well, to the world outside this communion and brotherhood. A light is kindled there, which lightens all them that are in the house. In other words, where Christian faith exists, there God’s congregation arises and lives in the world for the world; there Israel gathers apart from the Gentiles of the world; and there the Church gathers on its own behalf, the communion of saints. Yet not for its own purposes, but as the manifestation of the Servant of God, whom God has set there for all men, as the Body of Christ. And this story happens – now we reach the human work which answers to God’s work and nature in the election of His grace – in the answer of obedience. Faith is obedience, not just a passive accommodation of oneself. Where there is obedience, there is also choice on man’s part; faith is chosen instead of its opposite, unbelief, trust instead of distrust, knowledge instead of ignorance. Faith means choosing between faith and unbelief, wrong belief and superstition. Faith is the act in which man relates himself to God as is appropriate to God. For this work takes place in a stepping out of neutrality towards God, out of any disavowal of obligation towards Him in our existence and attitude, out of the private sphere, into resoluteness, responsibility and public life. Faith without this tendency to public life, faith that avoids this difficulty, has become in itself unbelief, wrong belief, superstition. For faith that believes in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit cannot refuse to become public.

‘Christian faith is the decision in which men have the freedom . . .’ said the opening sentence. In public responsibility, too, there is a permission granted to men, an open door, and that means a freedom. To freedom of trust and freedom of knowledge we must now add freedom of responsibility. Here one freedom is inseparable from the other. If you merely want to be free to trust God and think you can then renounce knowledge, you would not in fact be trusting Him. And if you had all trust and all knowledge and did not have the freedom to answer publicly for your trust and your knowledge, you would have to be told straight that all is not well with your trust and your knowledge! In accordance with what the Christian Church confesses of Him, God Himself is He who did not wish to remain hidden, who did not and does not wish to be God for Himself alone. He is the God who in His royal majesty emerges from the mystery, from the heights of His divine existence and comes down to the humble estate of the universe created by Him. God Himself is He who is revealed as God. He who believes in this God cannot wish to hide this God’s gift, this God’s love, this God’s comfort and light, to hide his trust in His Word and His knowledge. The word and the work of the believer cannot possibly remain a neutral, uncommitted work and word. Where there is faith, God’s doxa, gloria, His brightness is necessarily made known on earth. And where God’s glory did not shine one way or another, however overcast and broken by our ways and our degeneration, there would be no faith; the comfort and the light we receive from God would not be accepted. God’s glory is hallowed in the universe, and the Name of the Holy One hallowed on earth, where men may believe, where God’s people, God’s congregation assembles and goes into action. Where there is faith, man in his complete limitation and helplessness, in his utter abandonment and folly, possesses the freedom, the freedom royal in all humility, to let the light shine of the doxa, of the gloria, of the glory of God. More is not required of us; but that is required of us. This public responsibility of our trust in God’s Word and of our knowledge of the truth of Jesus Christ is the general concept for what in the Christian sense is called confessing and confession. There is public responsibility in the Church’s language, but also in worldly attitudes and also and above all in the corresponding actions and conduct. In these three definitions of the concept of public responsibility, there are, if my diagnosis is correct, three forms of Christian confessing, inseparable from one another, not to be played off against one another, but necessarily to be thought of together; a confessing which, for its part, is an indispensable, basic form of Christian faith. The following expositions are therefore to be regarded as a synthesis.

1. In faith we have the freedom to be publicly responsible in the language of the Church for our trust and our knowledge. What does this mean? God’s congregation possessed and at all times possesses its own language. Nothing can change this. For it has in history its own special history, its own special road. It speaks, when it confesses, in relation to this special history. It stands in the quite special concrete historical context, which has at all times formed its language and will continue to form it. Therefore the language of faith, the language of public responsibility in which as Christians we are bound to speak, will inevitably be the language of the Bible, the Hebrew and the Greek Bible and the translations of them, and the language of Christian tradition, the language in the forms of the thoughts, concepts and ideas, in which in the course of centuries the Christian Church has gained and upheld and declared its knowledge. There is a specifically Church language. That is in order. Let us call it by the familiar name by saying that there is a ‘language of Canaan’. And when the Christian confesses his faith, when we have to let the light that is kindled in us shine, no one can avoid speaking in this language. For this is how it is: if the things of Christian faith, if our trust in God and His Word is to be expressed precisely, so to speak in its essence – and time and again it is bitterly necessary for this to be done, so that things may be made clear – then it is inevitable that all undaunted the language of Canaan should sound forth. For certain lights and indications and heartening warnings can be uttered directly in this language alone. To anyone rather too sensitive in his desires and too tender about dealing with his soul – ‘I believe, but my faith is so deep and inward that I cannot bring myself to utter the words of the Bible, that it is difficult for me to pronounce God’s name, let alone the name of Christ or the blood of Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit’ – to anyone who should speak in this strain, I would say: ‘Dear friend, you may be a very spiritual man, but see to it that you are deemed worthy to be publicly responsible for your faith. And is your alleged shyness not shyness about emerging from your uncommitted private world? Ask yourself!’ One thing is certain: that where the Christian Church does not venture to confess in its own language, it usually does not confess at all. Then it becomes the fellowship of the quiet, whereby it is much to be hoped that it does not become a community of dumb dogs. Where people believe, the urgent question arises whether they do not speak joyfully and gladly also, just as the Bible has spoken and as in ancient and more recent times the Church has spoken and must speak. Where faith in its freedom and joy is in the field, in this language too God’s praise will be indeed uplifted and sung.

2. But this is not the end of the matter. More than this belongs to the complete concept of confessing. Let us be fully on our guard against the idea that confession is a matter of the faith which should be heard only in the ‘area of the Church’. And that all that is to be done is to make this area visible and perhaps extend it a little into the world. The area of the Church stands in the world, as outwardly the Church stands in the village or in a city, beside the school, the cinema and the railway station. The Church’s language cannot aim at being an end in itself. It must be made clear that the Church exists for the sake of the world, that the light is shining in the darkness. As Christ did not come to let Himself be ministered unto, so too it does not become Christians to exist in their faith, as though they existed for themselves. But that means that, in the course of this making public of trust and knowledge, faith necessarily stipulates definite worldly attitudes. Where confession is serious and clear, it must be fundamentally translatable into the speech of Mr Everyman, the man and woman in the street, into the language of those who are not accustomed to reading Scripture and singing hymns, but who possess a quite different vocabulary and quite different spheres of interest. Such is the world into which Christ sent His disciples and in which all of us exist too. Not one of us is only a Christian; we are all also a bit of the world. And so we are necessarily also concerned with worldly attitudes, with translations of our responsibility into this realm. For the Confession of Faith claims to be fulfilled in its application to the life we all live, to the problems of our actual existence in the theoretical and practical questions of our everyday life. If our faith is real, it must encroach upon our life. The Christian Confession in its original Church form will always be exposed to the misunderstanding that the Christian regards the Creed as a matter of heart and conscience, but that here on earth and in the world other truths hold good. The world lives in this misunderstanding; it regards the whole of Christianity as a friendly ‘magic’, connected with the ‘realm of religion’, which is respected and which ought to be left untampered with; and so we get rid of the matter! But this misunderstanding might even come from within; a Christian might quite well wish to have this realm for himself and to guard faith like a sensitive plant. The relationship between the Church and the world has been widely understood as a question of a fixing of frontiers, whereby each secured itself behind its own frontier, although from time to time it came to a skirmish. From the Church’s standpoint, however, such a fixing of frontiers can never exhaust its task. By the very nature of the Christian Church there is only one task, to make the Confession heard in the sphere of the world as well. Not now repeated in the language of Canaan, but in the quite sober, quite unedifying language which is spoken ‘out there’. There must be translation, for example, into the language of the newspaper. What we have to do is to say in the common language of the world the same thing as we say in the forms of Church language. The Christian need not be afraid of having to speak ‘unedifyingly’ as well. If a man cannot, let him consider whether he really knows how to speak edifyingly even in the Church. We know this language of the pulpit and the altar, which outside the area of the Church is as effectual as Chinese. Let us beware of remaining stuck where we are and refusing to advance to meet worldly attitudes. For instance, in 1933 in Germany there was plenty of serious, profound and living Christianity and confession – God be praised and thanked! But unfortunately this faith and confession of the German Church remained embedded in the language of the Church, and did not translate what was being excellently said in the language of the Church into the political attitude demanded at the time; in which it would have become clear that the Evangelical Church had to say ‘No’ to National Socialism, ‘No’ from its very roots. The confession of Christianity did not at the time become clear in this form. Think what would have happened, had the Evangelical Church at that time expressed its Church knowledge in the form of a worldly, political attitude. It was not capable of that and the results are open to the day. And as a second example there is, even to-day, serious, living Christianity. I am sure that the course of events has aroused in many hunger and thirst for the Word of God, and that a great hour has arrived for the Church. I hope that a space for the Church is not set up again and fortified, and the Christians gather among themselves. Theology must, of course, be pursued in all seriousness. But may we be confronted, and better than twelve years ago, with the fact that what has to happen in the Church must go out into the form of worldly attitudes. An evangelical Church which was to-day, say, prepared to keep silence on the question of guilt with regard to the events from which we have issued, which was unwilling to listen to this question which must be answered honestly for the sake of the future, would a priori condemn itself to unfruitfulness. A Church which was not clear on this point of having a duty to this nation in need, and not merely the task of giving Christian instruction in direct form, but which has the task of making this Christian instruction known in words which grapple with the problems of the day – a Church which was not filled with anxiety to discover this word, would a priori betake itself to a corner of the graveyard. May every individual Christian be clear that so long as his faith is a snail’s shell, in which he feels comfortable, but which does not bother itself with the life of his people, so long, that is, as he lives in dualism, he has not yet really come to believe! This snail’s shell is not a desirable residence. It is not good to be here. Man is a whole and can only exist as such a whole.
In conclusion, the last part of the introductory statement ends with ‘the corresponding actions and attitudes’. I have deliberately distinguished this from the second point. What would it avail a man, if he should speak and confess in most powerful language, and had not love? Confession means a living confession. If you believe, you are challenged to pay in person, payer de sa personne. That is the crucial point.