The Word of God and the Word of Man

Overview

About three hundred and thirty pages, a collection of lectures and addresses Karl Barth delivered between 1916 and 1923, gathered and published together, and translated into English in 1928 by Douglas Horton under the title that became standard for the whole collection, The Word of God and the Word of Man. Barth was, across most of this period, a Reformed pastor in the small Swiss village of Safenwil, not yet the internationally famous theologian and author of the immense, unfinished Church Dogmatics he would spend the rest of his career writing; these lectures capture him in the act of working out, in real time and often in the practical language of a working parish minister rather than a professional academic, the theological revolution that would come to be known as dialectical theology or neo-orthodoxy.

The decisive biographical event standing behind the whole collection is the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and, specifically, Barth’s discovery that nearly all of his own former theology professors in Germany, men whose liberal Protestant theology he had been trained in and largely absorbed, had signed a public manifesto supporting the German Kaiser’s war policy. For Barth, this was not merely a political disappointment but a theological catastrophe: it revealed, to his mind, that the entire nineteenth-century liberal theological tradition, which had worked to make Christian faith continuous with modern culture, historical progress, ethical idealism and inner religious experience, had nothing independent left to say when that same culture marched enthusiastically into catastrophic war. If theology could be so completely absorbed into and dependent on prevailing cultural assumptions, Barth concluded, it had lost any genuine claim to speak a word from God rather than merely echoing, with religious vocabulary attached, whatever human culture already believed.

The argument

God as wholly other. The theological center from which every lecture in the collection proceeds is Barth’s insistence that God is wholly other, ganz andere, categorically and qualitatively distinct from human beings, human culture, human morality and human religious experience, rather than their highest development or fullest expression. Nineteenth-century liberal theology, in Barth’s diagnosis, had effectively collapsed this distinction, treating God as continuous with the best of human moral and religious striving, so that speaking of God became, in practice, a way of speaking about elevated human ideals, cultural progress or refined inner feeling. Barth’s insistence on radical divine otherness is meant to cut this connection decisively: God cannot be reached by extending, refining or purifying anything already available within human experience or culture, because God stands genuinely outside and over against that whole realm, addressing it from beyond rather than emerging out of its own internal development.

The strange new world within the Bible. One of the collection’s most vivid and most frequently anthologized pieces develops this claim specifically with respect to Scripture. Barth argues that the Bible should not be approached as a repository of religious insights, moral teachings or historical information to be extracted, evaluated and fitted into categories a reader already possesses, the characteristic approach of much liberal biblical scholarship of the period, which increasingly treated the Bible primarily as a historical document to be critically analyzed rather than as a living address. Instead, Barth insists, the Bible opens onto a genuinely strange new world, God’s own world, which does not conform itself to the reader’s existing categories and expectations but stands over against them, confronting and questioning the reader from a position genuinely outside ordinary human religious and moral experience rather than confirming or illustrating it.

The righteousness of God as judgment before grace. Another central lecture, The Righteousness of God, works out a related claim in more explicitly dialectical form: that divine righteousness cannot be identified with any human achievement, however admirable, our justice systems, our moral progress, our civilization’s best accomplishments, all of which Barth insists must first be encountered as standing under a genuine divine No, a real judgment and negation, rather than being quietly baptized as already approximately divine. Only through this initial, uncompromising negation, Barth argues, does God’s righteousness paradoxically become available as grace, an unexpected Yes that arrives only on the far side of judgment rather than as a gentle affirmation of what human beings were already doing reasonably well on their own.

The impossible task of the ministry. The collection’s most personally revealing and most practically oriented piece addresses the specific dilemma facing anyone, like Barth himself throughout most of this period, actually charged with preaching from a pulpit week after week. As ministers, Barth argues, preachers stand under a genuine obligation to speak of God, since this is precisely what their office requires of them. And yet, as finite, sinful human beings, they are, on Barth’s own account of divine otherness, radically unable to do this, since no human speech, however careful or well-intentioned, can simply reach across the qualitative distinction separating God from humanity and deliver God’s own word under human control. Barth refuses to resolve this genuine impossibility by softening either half of the contradiction, neither by lowering what preaching is supposed to accomplish nor by pretending human speech can somehow bridge the gap on its own resources; instead he insists the preacher must stand consciously within this impossible situation, and that recognizing the impossibility honestly, rather than papering over it with false confidence, is itself, paradoxically, the beginning of genuine faithfulness to the task.

Theology as crisis. Running throughout the collection, and giving the broader movement Barth was helping found its name, dialectical theology, or sometimes theology of crisis, is the conviction that authentic theological speech must proceed by holding together genuinely opposed claims, human speech both obligated and unable, divine judgment that becomes grace only by first being judgment, rather than resolving these tensions prematurely into a single comfortable, stable position. This dialectical method, refusing final synthesis in favor of sustained, productive contradiction, distinguishes Barth’s early theological style sharply from both the confident liberal Protestant synthesis he was reacting against and from more traditional forms of dogmatic system-building that resolve tensions into settled doctrinal formulas.

How to read it

Read The Task of the Ministry first if you read only one piece from the collection. It states Barth’s central dialectical method most directly and most personally, in language addressed to working pastors rather than professional theologians, and it makes vivid exactly what is at stake, practically as well as theologically, in his larger claims about divine otherness.

Read The Strange New World within the Bible as a direct challenge to the historical-critical approach to Scripture that dominated the liberal theological education Barth himself had received, and consider what is gained and what might be lost by Barth’s insistence that the Bible should confront rather than simply be analyzed.

Keep the historical context of 1914 constantly in view as you read. These are not abstract theological exercises but a direct, ongoing response to what Barth experienced as a catastrophic failure of an entire theological generation, and understanding that provocation sharpens the force of claims that can otherwise read as simply severe or paradoxical for their own sake.

Notice how consistently Barth refuses easy resolution. The impossible task of the ministry, the righteousness of God as judgment before grace, the strange new world that questions rather than confirms: in each case Barth holds two claims in genuine, unresolved tension rather than synthesizing them into a single comfortable position, and recognizing this dialectical refusal as a deliberate method, not a failure of clarity, is essential to reading him well.

Read this collection as the seed of the much larger Church Dogmatics that occupied the rest of Barth’s career. Many of the same core convictions, God’s otherness, the priority of divine revelation over human religious experience, appear here in compressed, lecture-length form that the later multi-volume work would develop at enormously greater length and systematic detail.

Questions it raises

• Does insisting on God’s radical otherness from human culture and morality protect theology from the kind of capitulation Barth witnessed in 1914, or does it risk making God so distant that theology has nothing concrete left to say about actual human life?
• Is the preacher’s task genuinely impossible in the way Barth describes, and if so, what does it mean to continue performing a task one openly acknowledges cannot actually be accomplished?
• Barth argues that divine righteousness must first be encountered as judgment before it can be received as grace. Does this dialectical sequence do real theological work, or does it merely restate the problem of evil and grace in different terms?
• What is lost, and what is gained, by treating Scripture primarily as a strange world that questions the reader rather than as a historical document to be critically analyzed and understood on the reader’s own terms?
• Barth’s theology emerged from a specific historical crisis, the failure of liberal Protestantism to resist wartime nationalism. How much of his argument depends on that specific historical failure, and how much would hold independently of it?
• Is dialectical theology’s refusal to resolve tension into a stable synthesis a genuine theological insight, or a rhetorical strategy that avoids having to commit to clear, testable claims?