Credo. Karl Barth

God or belonging to itself independently. This very same recollection of the Creator’s transcendence will, however, also warn us against denying God’s co-existence with the world and therefore His immanence, i.e. His free omnipotent presence and lordship in the world that He created. God never and nowhere becomes world. The world never and nowhere becomes God. God and world remain over against each other. The limit of this statement must not be forgotten: the Word of God in the flesh. Within that limit this statement certainly holds. But in standing over against the World that He has made, God is present to it—not only far, but also near, not only free in relation to it, but bound to it, not only transcendent, but also immanent. Here there can be no question of any conception of transcendence to be defined by logic. We are concerned with the transcendence of God the Creator. The knowledge of that compels the recognition of His immanence also.—The old Dogmatics handled this side of the doctrine of Creation under the title De providentia, of divine Providence. I can reproduce its content here only very briefly. To the world (also to man!) as His creature God the Creator is present in this way, that He maintains it in its relative independence and peculiar character, in its reality which differs from His reality; but at the same time also, as the absolutely supreme Lord, He accompanies and therefore rules the world in whole and in part, according to His divine will and pleasure, without totally or even partly abolishing the contingency of the creature, or the freedom of the human will. The Pelagian doctrine of freedom and the fatalistic doctrine of necessity, the indeterminism of the old Lutherans and Molinists and the determinism of Zwingli (which also, if I see aright, was still in 1525 that of Luther!) represent in what are fundamentally similar ways misreadings of that freedom in which providence recognises, encompasses and governs the contingency of the creature, the freedom of the human will as such. The school of Calvin has here shown the lines along which we can “understand,” on the one hand, the reality that belongs to the created world, without exalting it to be a god alongside of God, and on the other hand, the sovereignty of God, without taking from the created world its reality.

      But the doctrine of Creation has its definite limits which have got to be known if that doctrine is to be rightly understood. God is no doubt even as Creator the one God in His totality, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but in knowing God, Who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as Creator, we can only partly know Him. The first Article of the Creed must necessarily be followed by the second and the third. I conclude with pointing to these limits. There are again two things to which we have to pay attention:—

      1. There are definite and necessary questions of faith which are not to be answered from the doctrine of creation, or at least not unequivocally and completely. Such is the question about the possibility of sin as the act in which, in defiance of the sovereignty of God, the creature arrogates to himself not only his own reality but independent reality, an absolute independence, and therefore makes himself God. Further, the question about the possibility of evil, i.e. of such experiences as notoriously are not to man’s highest advantage in spite of the goodness of the world made by God, as do not conduce to God’s being glorified by man, but rather the reverse. Finally, the question about the possibility of death as such an end of creaturely existence as, despite the sustaining grace of divine forbearance, means its precipitation into the void. These three questions, known by the name of the Problem of Theodicy, could be concentrated into the question about the possibility which the Devil had, and has, to be the Devil. From the viewpoint of the dogma of creation it is no doubt possible to answer with the assertion that God as the Creator of the world in its true reality which is determined by Him, is the supreme Lord and Victor also over these absurd, these impossible possibilities. But it cannot be said that God willed and created these possibilities also as such. The seriousness of the questions which are raised in view of these possibilities, the whole reality and the whole character of sin, evil, death and the devil would, with Schleiermacher and many others be misapprehended, or God would, with Zwingli, be turned into an incomprehensible tyrant, if these possibilities were to be included in the work of divine creation, and consequently justified as appointed and willed by God. In order to keep true to the facts, Dogmatics has here, as in other places, to be logically inconsequent. Therefore in spite of the omnipotence of God—or rather on the score of the rightly understood omnipotence of God, Dogmatics must not at this place carry the Creation-thought right to the end of the line. It must rather explain those possibilities as being such that we have indeed to reckon most definitely with their reality, but are unable better to describe their real nature and character than by forbearing to ask for their raison d’être either in the will of God the Creator or even with Marcion and the Manicheans in the will of a wicked Anti-God. These possibilities are to be taken seriously as the mysterium iniquitatis. The existence of such a thing, however, is not to be perceived from creation, but only from the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

      2. But there are also definite and equally necessary answers of faith, which also admit of being ranged, though likewise not satisfactorily, within the framework of the knowledge of God the Creator. There is miracle as the event in which in an extraordinary manner the order of the world, destroyed by sin, evil, death and devil, is temporarily restored by God Himself, as an accompanying sign of His revelation. Prayer, in which man not only speaks with God, but in spite of sin, evil, death and devil is heard and answered by God, and, incomprehensibly, with and in spite of all difference between Creator and creature, with the will of God has part in determining the will of God. Finally, the Church as the place where, in the midst of the dominion of sin, evil, death and devil, there is proclaimed and accepted a special presence of God, the presence of God in His revelation in contradistinction to the presence of God the Creator, which, in spite of everything, cannot and must not be denied to the rest of human history and society. All these are in any case very special forms of divine immanence in the world. In view of these things our forefathers were in the habit of speaking of providentia speciallissima. And these things pass beyond our range of vision because they are all bound up with the central mystery of the Incarnation, which is most assuredly misunderstood if with Schleiermacher it is understood as the completion and crown of creation. It is not that in Christ creation has reached its goal, but that in Christ the Creator has become—and this is something different—Himself creature; the creature has been assumed into unity with the Creator as first-fruits of a new creation. Projecting our thought “consequently” along the line of the creation dogma, we should have in one way or another to deny the Incarnation, Miracle, prayer, the Church. That has often enough been done. But the facts demand that we give it up, though consistency seems to demand it. In truth it is just in the knowledge of Jesus Christ that we stand at the source of the creation, faith and dogma. If we did not know about the immanence, once and for all and in an altogether special sense, of the Word of God in the flesh, how would and could we dare, in despite of sin, evil, death and devil, to believe in a general immanence of God in the world, and to live? Therefore far from our having to, or being able to, deny the former for the sake of the latter, we have to acknowledge the former in order rightly to believe and teach the latter.

       V

       ET IN JESUM CHRISTUM, FILIUM EIUS UNICUM

      WITH these words we step into the great centre of the Christian Creed. And here decisions are made. For instance, our understanding of the second Article decides whether we rightly understand the first and the third, and therefore whether we understand the whole as Christian creed in its true nature and distinct from all other actual and possible creeds. Whether a sermon and proclamation in word or writing have rightly or wrongly a place in the Christian Church is decided by their relationship to the second article. At this point Dogmatics, as watchman, cannot be too wide-awake. Besides, even its own fate is here decided, namely, in the question whether it is genuinely Church Theology, because bound to the exegesis of the Holy Scriptures as witness to revelation, or on the other hand a Philosophy, working with Biblical and Church materials under another sovereignty altogether. The decision that is here made is of course not a human, but a divine and therefore ultimately hidden, decision. That is the proviso under which human, even Christian judgment will here also have to bow. Even