Barth's "Göttingen Dogmatics" - §3: Deus Dixit (“God has spoken”)

By -
We return to Barth’s first dogmatics lectures, and to the elaboration of one of his key theological concepts – both in this earlier period as well as throughout his later Church Dogmatics, although there it recedes into the background a bit despite continuing to be of foundational importance: Deus dixit, God has spoken.

Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion

This is part 4 of a multi-part series, and you can find the series index here.





I begin the audio recordings by reading Barth’s Diktatsatz, so I will begin reproducing that here as well. The bold is mine and indicates where I find emphasis:

Christian preachers dare to speak about God. The permission and requirement to do so can rest only on their adoption of the witness of the prophets and apostles that underlies the church, the witness which is to the effect that God himself has spoken and that for this reason, and with this reference, they too must speak about God. This assumption can arise only because they take it that God’s address is directed to them as well. It means that with fear and trembling they recognize God as the true subject of the biblical witness and their own proclamation.

What follows are some brief quotes from my commentary on Barth’s text:

“Speaking about God is not something that human beings can or would do without provocation.”

“Barth through this section makes a minimal distinction between preachers and theologians.”

“Barth is underscoring that God has an objective reality, but that objective reality is nonobjectifiable.”

“God’s relationship to everything that is not-God is noncompetitive. … [This] is a really important conceptual tool in [Barth’s] theological toolbox.”

“At no point is this resolved in any kind of permanent way. There is only the encounter with the ‘Deus dixit’ in the ‘Paulus dixit’ in the event of faith.”

“As soon as you resolve the paradox away, you’ve turned the living words of Scripture into a form of idolatry.”

“Just like you can’t climb up a conceptual ladder to God’s revelation, so you cannot climb up an historical ladder to God’s revelation.”

“Barth is saying that if you are encountered by the ‘Deus dixit,’ all of that kind of bourgeois self-satisfaction goes out the window.”

Pictured: the author standing outside the theology building at the University of Göttingen, December, 2019.

==================================


Subscribe to Die Evangelischen Theologen

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

So, You Want To Read Karl Barth?

By -
Image
Every now and then I am asked for advice about studying Karl Barth. So, I thought that I would share some of my standard advice here. But, before I do that, let me just say that I am by no means a Barth expert as compared to the people whose books I will mention below. I would be thrilled to find myself in their league one day, but as of yet that remains a distant dream. Still, I have been reading Barth for long enough, and under the supervision of a number of the scholars that I will mention below, that I think I can provide a decent orientation. I have never read Karl Barth before. Which of his books should I read first? Barth’s most famous work is the monumental 13-volume Church Dogmatics . Reading the CD with understanding is not an easy thing, so you definitely do NOT want to start here. Luckily, there are two smaller works by Barth that serve as helpful introductions to his work. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction - Based on the lectures that Barth delivered duri
Keep reading

So You Want to Read….Dietrich Bonhoeffer?

By -
Image
"I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven." "The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from everyday Christian life in community…may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is knocking at the door." "Since ethical thinking in terms of realms is overcome by faith in the revelation of the ultimate reality in Jesus Christ . . . there is no real Christian existence outside the reality of the world." "People who reject their bodies reject their existence before God the Creator." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer Prelude Andreas Steinhoff [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons I envisioned having a lot of time for blogging this summer, but that simply has not been the case - the last month has been a crazy one, to say the least. For two weeks, I was working at a theology summer camp of sorts, the Duke Youth Academy, and s
Keep reading

2010 KBBC: Week 1, Day 5

By -
“You Wonder Where the Spirit Went”: Jenson and Barth on the Hiddenness of God By Peter Kline I am entering into a conversation that Jenson has already begun with Barth. In a constructive essay on the hiddenness of God (Jenson 2000), Jenson considers Barth’s position on the matter only to find it lacking. I want to explore why Jenson has problems with Barth on this issue, as well think critically about his constructive alternative. I will suggest that Jenson is only partly right in his diagnosis of Barth; he in fact overlooks the heart of Barth’s teaching on divine hiddenness. The reason is that he looks in the wrong place for Barth’s pneumatology. Jenson can’t find the Spirit in Barth not because the Spirit isn’t there, but because the Spirit is hidden . These considerations will open out into a comparison of Barth and Jenson on the logic of revelation. By “logic” I mean: what is discourse about God’s revealedness and hiddenness supposed to accomplish? Part I Jenson focuses his a
Keep reading

2010 KBBC: Week 3, Day 1

By -
On the Monstrosity of Christ : Karl Barth in Conversation with Slavoj Žižek & John Milbank By Paul Dafydd Jones For a while, I hoped to frame this conversation in terms of a dramatic interchange – something along the lines of “A Slovenian philosopher, a British theologian, and a Swiss dogmatician walk into a bar…” Alongside an eye-wateringly hip assemblage of cinematic references, literary allusions, and comedic scenes – my early favorites being when Barth imagines a young adult novel, entitled Are you there God? It’s me, Žižek , and when Milbank waxes poetic about the Twilight movies – I wanted to engage some topics that would likely receive attention, were the authors to meet for drinks. Primarily, I envisioned an intense discussion of the logos asarkos and the logos ensarkos , with Milbank talking up the former category, Barth emphasizing the latter, and Žižek asking whether recent debates are but symptoms of secret puzzle, embedded in the Church Dogmatics – a puzzle that
Keep reading

Karl Barth on Hell, the Devil, Demons, and Universalism – A Florilegium

By -
Image
You know, all the most interesting topics. Although Barth often confessed that he didn’t find these questions particularly interesting. At best they might draw sideways glances, as it were, as one travels the theological road. But I found a number of places in the records of Barth’s later conversations that I thought folks might find interesting, so I’ve collected them here. And if you aren’t familiar with the term “florilegium,” here you go ! All these texts are from the first volume of Barth in Conversation , with pages numbers given in parentheses along the way. As usual, italics are in the text and bold is mine. Hell “Now we come to hell. You shouldn’t laugh! There is nothing to laugh at! What does hell mean? I think hell means to be in the place where you are once fore all damned and lost without ceasing to exist, without losing the image of God, being what you are but being damned and lost, separated from God, whose creature you are, separated also from your neighbor, from
Keep reading