The Threefold Form of the “One Voice”
Doctrinally, Barth “seeks understanding” of the unaccountable mystery of God’s revelation by way of the Christological formula of Chalcedon.9 Jesus Christ is fully human and fully divine, two natures, united yet unmixed in one person. The two natures of the one Jesus Christ constitute not only the soteriological event of reconciliation between God and the human creature; it also constitutes both the event and means of communication between God and the human creature of the good news of that reconciliation (“I am with you”). God speaks God’s Word to the human ear and heart in the human vernacular, so to speak. God’s Word for and to us does not drop out of the sky and fall directly into our heads, transparent and in the raw.10 God’s Word comes to the creature in creaturely form, and is therefore a Word that is to be heard (and known, believed, confessed) by the creature in her or his creaturely form, as creature; it is spoken to and heard by the particular human addressee in her or his historical situation. The point is, after all, divine-human communion. The human partner is to remain “fully human” in this relation, the integrity of the creature respected, honored, and in tact, rather than breached, violated. There is no mixing of natures in some bizarre, cosmic work of divine alchemy. Weird science, no; unaccountable mystery of divine freedom, yes.
The outside shows up on the inside. “This ‘God with us’ has happened. It has happened in human history as a part of human history. Yet it has not happened as other parts of this history usually happen.”11 Teasing out the logic of this “Yet” is the key to understanding what Barth is up to with regard to the One Voice of revelation.
First, within human history as a part of human history. Revelation has happened primarily and once for all within history as the part of history known as the life, death, and resurrection of the person, Jesus Christ. But for Barth, revelation has happened, and continues to happen, in a secondary and dependent way, within history as two particular parts of history known as the Bible, the scriptural witness to that primary event, what the Church calls the Old and New Testaments, and secondly, the Church’s proclamation of that primary, once for all event on the basis of that scriptural witness. The primary event of revelation that is identical with the person of Jesus Christ, what Barth calls the Word of God revealed, “is the form that underlies the other two.” Both scripture and proclamation, therefore, “renounce any foundation apart from that which God has given once for all by speaking.”12 And this once for all speech, this decisive divine Word, is the divine-human person of Jesus Christ. However, Barth goes on to say, the primary event of revelation that has taken place in Jesus Christ “is the very one that never meets us anywhere in abstract form. We know it only indirectly, from Scripture and proclamation. The direct Word of God meets us only in this two-fold mediacy.”13
Second, yet not as other parts of human history. Yes, God’s Word always finds our ears and hearts in the form of a fully human word—particular, historical, concrete; spoken within the cacophony of history as part of the cacophony of history. Yet, it never ceases to be fully divine—God’s own Word spoken to the creature that the creature cannot speak for or to his or herself.14 In the free event of revelation, the creaturely, human phenomena of scripture and proclamation become truly and fully God’s Word, divine speech. Both “the human prophetic and apostolic word” and “the word of the modern [i.e., contemporary] preacher” constitute “a human word to which God has given Himself as object . . . a human word in which God’s own address to us is an event,” a human word that “is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that he speaks through it.”15 And as such, as God’s Word, it is a particular Word that determines and comprehends all other words; it is a particular part of human history that determines and comprehends the whole of human history.
This is what Barth calls the threefold form of the Word of God. God’s eternal Word for and to us that is the person of Jesus Christ addresses us and meets us within human history as a part of human history, in the form of scriptural witness to and Church proclamation of Jesus Christ. It is not, then, to be sought elsewhere—above or beneath history, or as the whole of history, or as indiscriminately suffusing history and/or the cosmos.16 And here again, there is offense enough for everyone. While the particular, fully human words of scriptural witness and Church proclamation only become God’s Word to us when God freely chooses to speak through them in the event of revelation, it is nevertheless these particular human words through which God speaks. Consequently, it is this outside showing up on the inside—in the seed of Abraham, in the Jewish flesh of Jesus Christ as confessed by the Church—that causes all the trouble for us moderns (and postmoderns), who are concerned both about imperialistic discourse in general and the Church’s interpretive imperialism in relation to Jews and Judaism in particular. In the confession of the Jew, Jesus Christ, as the one Word of God for and to the human being, we cannot escape the fact that the world, the nations, all of human, and indeed, non-human created reality receives its meaning through the lens of Abraham and the history of Israel. Neither can we escape the fact, then, that Barth’s doctrine of revelation, with Jesus Christ as the content of the revealed Word, is organically linked to the doctrine of election.17 It is this doctrinal “perfect storm”—the folding together of revelation, Christology, and election in Barth’s fundamental theological assumptions—that constitutes the structural and substantive elements of the interpretive imperialism entailed in an understanding of Christian faith that takes Abraham as a model. (One might be tempted to include ecclesiology in this portentous doctrinal convergence, especially given that the primary activity of the Church, proclamation [in Barth’s view], constitutes one of the three forms of the Word of God that is Jesus Christ. This organic link is very real in Barth’s thinking, but it is a strictly ordered link, whereby the life and activity of the Church are strictly dependent upon the living reality of Jesus Christ, rather than identical to it. We will revisit this in our reading of Ruether, who does indeed include ecclesiology in her own analysis of the perfect doctrinal storm of Christian anti-Judaism; and that analysis and its resultant remedy, I will argue, is worse off for that interpretive decision.)
We will proceed, then, by focusing on a reading of Barth’s doctrine of election, in order to trace the consequences of this doctrinal “storm.” For it is his doctrine of election that offers the clearest example of how the very goodness of the news of Jesus Christ for the world (as the one—albeit threefold—Word of God spoken in the event of revelation) necessarily entails the apparent ethical bad news of Abrahamic interpretive imperialism in relation to both the nations, generally speaking, and, more specifically, the children of Abraham in the particular relation of the Church to Israel. This paradoxical turning of the Abrahamic interpretive imperialism of Christian faith “back” upon the children of Abraham is the inevitable consequence of the fact that the irrevocable affirmation of Abraham and Israel in the perfect storm of revelation, Christology, and election comes by way of their displacement by the one Jesus Christ from whom they receive their meaning. This displacement is all the more pronounced by the fact that the one Jesus Christ is confessed (as Messiah of Israel and Lord of all creation) by the Church. This radicalization of the displacement, wherein Abraham and Israel appear not only to receive their meaning through the particular lens of Jesus Christ, but through the lens of the Church’s confession