For Karl Barth four vital words are indissolubly connected: faith, grace, revelation and truth. To speak of faith, without acknowledging at once that it is by the grace of God who alone is truth that one can so speak, is to speak primarily of ourselves in place of God. For Barth, humanity's greatest need is for the righteousness of God – a righteousness without which we cannot live but that we cannot grasp at or control either – because it can only come to us as an act of revelation and reconciliation on God's part that itself establishes and maintains us in fellowship with God. This is ultimately an act of divine election that cannot be systematised by identifying it with any absolute decree or any result visible to historical, philosophical, psychological or even theological inquiry. Just as there is a creatio continua there is an electio continua, which Barth says is better described as ‘God's faithfulness and patience’.Footnote ¹

In 1916 Barth identified the ‘Strange New World within the Bible’ as ‘the world of God’Footnote ² which consists in the truth of the biblical witness and which we do not read about ‘either in the daily papers or in other books’.Footnote ³ For Barth ‘The Bible gives to . . . every era such answers to their questions as they deserve’Footnote ⁴ and so it can be disconcerting to discover that we are challenged to wonder exactly what it is that we are looking for in the Bible. For Barth the Bible gives us no rest at all and drives us ‘out beyond ourselves and invites us . . . to reach for the last highest answer’.Footnote ⁵ Moreover, the Bible will interpret itself to us ‘in spite of all our human limitations’ if only we dare to move, through the Spirit of God, beyond ourselves and into this new world. What is it that constitutes this daring? It

Even though Barth's emphasis here is on the world of God coming to us as an act arriving from outside of history, it is a divine act that includes us in a genuine relationship with God in faith. That is God's grace. Without being obligated to us, God places himself under obligation to us in his Son Jesus Christ.Footnote ⁷ Hence, ‘Where grace is revealed and operative, God Himself is always revealed and operative. It is not necessary for us to strive after a higher, better, more helpful revelation.’Footnote ⁸

Because this is God establishing his kingdom on earth in Jesus Christ, Barth insists ‘One can only believe – can only hold the ground whither he has been led. Or not believe. There is no third way.’Footnote ⁹ Knowledge of the truth that takes place in faith is a knowledge that is obedient to the call of God in Jesus Christ himself. And obedience for Barth is a free human act ratifying the divine action in our favour that has taken place in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.Footnote ¹⁰ The kind of faith Barth has in mind ‘cannot be compromised’ because it is ‘a victory of grace towards and in ourselves which corresponds to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and is like the divine certainty of Jesus Christ’.Footnote ¹¹ Since we are enemies of grace apart from Christ, Barth seeks a ‘true and certain faith’, that is, a faith that is not the continuation of our self-knowledge because ‘The New Testament witnesses tell us how their unbelief, not their knowledge, was changed into faith’.Footnote ¹² Faith's meaning therefore must ‘not start from the believing man but from Jesus Christ as the object and foundation of faith’.Footnote ¹³ The Holy Spirit creates the relation between God and us without which we cannot exist.Footnote ¹⁴ ‘He is the Spirit of truth because in Him it is none other than the living God, i.e., the trinitarian God, who is present and revealed and active. He is the Spirit of the Father and the Son.’Footnote ¹⁵ For that reason

In this light ‘what is required is [the church's] criticism and correction in the light of the being of the Church, of Jesus Christ as its basis, goal and content’.Footnote ¹⁷ That is what is witnessed to in the whole of the Bible beginning with the story of Abraham and ending with Pentecost and beyond.

The Bible and religion

Barth also stated that true religion, i.e. ‘what we are to think concerning God, how we are to find him, and how we are to conduct ourselves in his presence – all that is included in . . . “worship and service”’,Footnote ¹⁸ is revealed in the Bible. But he immediately insists ‘there is something greater in the Bible than religion and “worship”’, noting that Catholics and Protestants each appeal ‘with the same earnestness and zeal to the Bible’, each insisting that it is the ‘religion revealed in the Bible, or at least its most legitimate successor’.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet Barth will not enter the dispute about which group is right or wrong because he sees that as an unending conflict about ‘religion’; nor will he say that everyone is right either. Arguing over the truth of religion leaves us ‘in the midst of a vast human controversy and far, far away from reality, or what might become reality in our lives’. Here Barth turns his definition of religion upside down by reversing the whole enterprise:

While religion concerns our inquiry about what we are to think about God and how we are to reach him, Barth claims that if we read the Bible in faith we discover that this is entirely the wrong question. It only leads to conflict and controversy; it represents a form of self-justification and thereby illustrates why religion is so problematic and can never in itself lead to the truth revealed in the Bible. Without faith we will always assume that we actually can find the proper way to speak about God by means of our religious quest. But faith alone will allow us to recognise that God has already sought and found us in Jesus Christ. Consequently, we not only do not have to put ourselves into right relation with God through some religious practice; we cannot. We only have to believe and accept the Word of God which binds us and enables us to worship God in Spirit and in truth and also to know him with a certainty that is impossible to achieve without relying on the grace of his own self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In this sense ‘to speak God's Word, and cause it to be heard, is and remains God's concern’.Footnote ²¹ Right religious practice then will follow from faith and not otherwise since the Word ‘claims ourselves as doers of the work which corresponds to its content’.Footnote ²²

The righteousness of God

In another 1916 lecture Barth observed that ‘the really tragic, the most fundamental, error of mankind’ is that ‘We long for the righteousness of God, and yet we do not let it enter our lives and our world’Footnote ²³ because we are concerned primarily with our seeking God. Therefore we place ourselves and our various moral, religious and political ideals at the centre in a way that changes the righteousness of God, which is the ‘surest of facts’, into ‘the highest among various high ideals’ and thus something that is ‘our very own affair’, instead of something that can be realised only by God himself.Footnote ²⁴ Recognised or not, this taking God's righteousness under our management is the pride from which only God can rescue us. But this is impossible as long as we do not believe – as long as we cling to the deception that we can rely on ourselves at least in part to become righteous with the righteousness that comes only from God. Clinging to this deception represents the failure to believe, the failure to accept the grace of God's election and revelation itself as the truth of our lives and activities. As Barth explained in 1920:

The Bible offers true knowledge of God which is not ‘one supposed truth among other truths’. Responding to ‘the fact of election’ we discover the meaning of both our own existence and of history. Whereas Augustine and the Reformers unfortunately shaped the doctrine according to the ‘psychological unity of the individual’ and then stamped the ‘rigid laws of nature . . . once and for all . . . upon each man's salvation or damnation’, Barth insists that the doctrine of election is indeed ‘well adapted to the requirements of individual freedom’ because ‘our responses cannot be determined once and for all: they are constantly to be made anew’.Footnote ²⁶ Here the Bible tells us that ‘the knowledge of God is the eternal problem of our profoundest personal existence, that it is the starting-point at which we begin and yet do not begin, from which we are separated and yet are not separated’.Footnote ²⁷ In other words we are sinners whose unbelief and belief leave us in perplexity and fear so that we are led to the point where we realise that religion, culture, history and psychology cannot provide an answer.

But God himself can and does. God's truth is the secret meaning of history, piety and experience; yet the moment we focus on these in themselves we ignore the truth of God's electing grace attested in scripture – we ignore the very reality that alone gives meaning to our lives. Within this perspective the ‘Messiahship of Jesus must be kept secret’, Barth says, because ‘It is not a possibility of the old order: it is not a religious possibility. Jesus will be understood wholly or not at all.’Footnote ²⁸ Flesh and blood did not reveal to Peter that Jesus was the Christ but the Father in heaven did. And it is upon this rock that the church is built. Thus, when Peter began to question Christ's going to the cross, he no longer spoke from revelation but humanly ‘in the rôle of Satan’.Footnote ²⁹ The knowledge of the truth comes only from beyond the grave because ‘in the sacrifice of Christ the sacrifice demanded of us is made once and for all’. Because we ourselves are sacrificed with Christ, we have nothing to bring. Barth asks: Does life really come from death? Perhaps ‘it is possible to remain standing before the secret of the cross in perplexity, terror, and despair’.Footnote ³⁰ Death really is a ‘closed wall’ before which we all stand and the resurrection cannot simply be presupposed, because it is an act of God. We really may find the cross a stumbling block and foolishness.Footnote ³¹ But Barth insists

And the secret of Jesus’ life is that he is the Son of the living God. This act of God opposes ‘Religion's blind and vicious habit of asserting eternally that it possesses something, feasts upon it, and distributes it’.Footnote ³³ Hence:

Yet this secret ‘belongs neither to history nor to psychology; for what is historical and psychological is as such corruptible’. In this sense Christ's resurrection and second coming, which Barth says is the same thing, ‘is not a historical event’; as the only real happening in history this event is ‘not a real happening of history’.Footnote ³⁵ Because Christ's power comes into history from outside in order to completely recreate it, his divinity and power cannot be read off history. Consequently, ‘The Logos, if misunderstood, will stand in shame in the corner, as a myth.’Footnote ³⁶ Better this, according to Barth, than attempting to explain who Jesus was historically. Since the resurrection means a wholly new creation, a new world, a world of an entirely different quality and kind, we cannot discover the genuine meaning of our world except in the power of the resurrection itself. That meaning ‘is not a continuation of anything that has been or is, either in the spiritual or the natural realm, but [it] comes to our mind spontaneously as a new creation’.Footnote ³⁷ This is why Barth says that the truth of dogmatic inquiry which is known in faith ‘is in no sense assumed to be to hand. The truth comes, i.e., in the faith in which we begin to know, and cease, and begin again . . . [theological work] always takes place on the narrow way which leads from the enacted revelation to the promised revelation’.Footnote ³⁸ And for Barth

Furthermore, the Holy Spirit alone who makes us participants in revelation is the Spirit of Jesus Christ and ‘is not to be regarded . . . as a revelation of independent content, as a new instruction . . . that goes beyond Christ; beyond the Word’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Faith and unbelief

The stark disparity that Barth perceives between faith and unbelief applies to all aspects of theology including biblical theology. For Barth, if we read the Bible carefully, it ‘makes straight for the point where one must decide to accept or to reject the sovereignty of God. This is the new world within the Bible.’Footnote ⁴¹ But again, since this new world of God himself comes from beyond the scope of history, morality and religion, it often contradicts what these pursuits present as truth. For instance, Barth notes that in light of God's morality and his kingdom ‘David is a great man in spite of his adultery and bloody sword: blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity!’ And in this world ‘the publicans and the harlots will go before your impeccably elegant and righteous folk of good society!’ Indeed, in this world Barth explains that ‘the true hero is the lost son, who is absolutely lost and feeding swine – and not his moral elder brother’.Footnote ⁴² God's morality, the kingdom of God for which we pray, ‘Our Father . . .’, is not a kingdom which we must create by our acts of good will.Footnote ⁴³ It is not the unfolding of love as we may know it and practise it at all but ‘the existence and outpouring of eternal love, of love as God understands it’.Footnote ⁴⁴ And that love confounds our ordinary sense of morality because God's love takes place in accordance with his own sovereign decision to be for us in his own way. Because it also confounds our ordinary view of religion and of history, Barth insists upon seeking the truth of revelation and not just religion in the Bible.Footnote ⁴⁵

Perhaps the disparity between faith and unbelief can be most clearly seen when contrasted with a view that has become rather widespread today. For example, Sallie McFague writes that Jesus is ‘special to us as our foundational figure: he is our historical choice as the premier paradigm of God's love’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Since Jesus’ significance for faith rests on the community's choice, she claims ‘Jesus is not ontologically different from other paradigmatic figures’ who manifest God's love for the world.Footnote ⁴⁷ In reality, however, Jesus’ uniqueness is not at all defined by the decisions of the community but by who he is as the only begotten Son of the Father from all eternity. His true divinity can never be seen or acknowledged unless it is accepted on its own termsFootnote ⁴⁸ as the starting point for all theological reflection, since Jesus himself is the way, the truth and the life.Footnote ⁴⁹ In other words, in a dogmatic theology that is biblically grounded, one literally cannot speak of truth in abstraction from God's grace, faith and revelation.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is revelation as a sovereign act of God, hidden in the cross and revealed in his resurrection, that makes faith objectively true, precisely because such faith is tied exclusively to the person and work of Jesus Christ himself as the true Son of God by nature. And faith itself is not under our control because ‘The Spirit guarantees man what he cannot guarantee himself, his personal participation in revelation.’Footnote ⁵¹ As such the Spirit is in us but never becomes identical with us since the Spirit remains the Lord.Footnote ⁵² And it is indeed only by the Holy Spirit that anyone can confess Jesus himself as the Lord.Footnote ⁵³ Consequently, there literally can be no circumventing Jesus Christ if there is to be genuine knowledge of God, revelation and grace. From McFague's perspective, faith is no longer tied to the object of faith presented by the Bible but is tethered to our own attempts to construct theological meaning by relying on our own self-chosen agenda. Hence, she believes we should remythologise the incarnation to recognise that we now have the power to kill God in the body of the world rather than in the particular man Jesus in order to help us preserve the earth.Footnote ⁵⁴ This thinking, however, represents a form of self-justification because it is Docetic in orientation and design and thus fails to allow the man Jesus from Nazareth in his unity with the divine Word to be the starting point and determining factor for its reflections.

This is why Barth firmly asserted that ‘Sin is always unbelief. And unbelief is always man's faith in himself.’Footnote ⁵⁵ By contrast, McFague speaks for many when she redefines sin:

Because she reconceives God as mother, lover and friend instead of recognising God in faith and through his own self-revelation as he eternally exists in his own transcendent freedom and love as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, McFague is no longer able even to distinguish God from the world.Footnote ⁵⁷ For her the word God itself has become a myth, a term which describes our relationship with the world and a vague belief in a God who is on the side of life and its fulfilment.Footnote ⁵⁸ Sin is merely a horizontal relation between us and the world imagined as God's body and can no longer be understood as a vertical relation of opposition to God who is above. Barth's thinking about God's righteousness, already noted, was not only profound but prophetic. Wherever and whenever God's actual sovereignty is ignored or called into question, as in McFague's analysis, the genuine problem of sin and unbelief is illustrated. It is pride – the human refusal to allow God to be God for us in the way he has freely chosen, that is, in his Word and Spirit.Footnote ⁵⁹

Many today argue that sin should no longer be understood as pride and thus espouse some form of religious self-reliance. This subverts the biblical meaning of faith as faith in Christ himself and not at all in ourselves. Faith in Christ means precisely surrendering to him alone as the source of all freedom and truth.Footnote ⁶⁰ In Barth's words, ‘To become obedient to Jesus is actually to become obedient to God, not a conceived and imaginary God, but to God as He is in His inmost essence, the gracious God, the God in whom we may believe.’Footnote ⁶¹ ‘He is the truth . . . To be of the truth means to hear His voice in encounter and confrontation with Him . . . To be of the truth means first to believe in Him.’Footnote ⁶² Hence Barth insists that ‘If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be freed indeed’Footnote ⁶³ and that ‘if in one sense or another the faith of the Christian is faith in himself . . . then we need not be surprised if it is not the victory which overcomes the world’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Christ is the one who represents us by turning faithfully to God in our place. Conversion to God takes place in Christ alone so that in the power of the Holy Spirit ‘in Jesus Christ man is directed by God to awakening and life in the freedom for which He has made him free’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Barth rightly insists that when we encounter the triune God we renounce any attempt to bring about our own conversion because ‘This is forbidden and prevented by the object of faith’ since faith in Christ ‘absolutely excludes any other helpers or helps’.Footnote ⁶⁶ If we try to understand faith by looking at ourselves, what we see is a lie and it may well lead us to question its possibility and to regard it as intolerable; yet we continually try to flee from this faith. Here, Barth insists, we must do the better thing, the needful thing: ‘We have to believe: not to believe in ourselves, but in Jesus Christ. In Him, along with our enmity against God's grace, our flight from faith too is limited, ended and destroyed.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Since faith means allowing God to speak to us through the biblical witness, it entails subordinating ourselves to the witness of scripture. But this does not mean that we allow our thoughts, concepts and convictions to be ‘supplanted’ by those of the prophets and apostles. ‘In that case we should not have subordinated ourselves to them, but at most adorned ourselves with their feathers.’Footnote ⁶⁸ It means accepting the true implication of their witness and acknowledging that God is right ‘instead of trying to prove ourselves right’. That is what it means to believe. Hence the new world of God's sovereignty which meets us in the biblical witness is his glory and his incomprehensible love. ‘Not the history of man but the history of God!’ writes Barth. ‘Not the virtues of men but the virtues of him who hath called us out of darkness into his marvelous light! Not human standpoints but the standpoint of God!’Footnote ⁶⁹ Once again, this thinking is not meant to eliminate human being and action in face of God's action but to say that no human action can be allowed, even momentarily, to have the first and final word concerning our morality, history and religion. Whenever that happens God is displaced, and certainty concerning the truth of all human activity becomes shrouded in obscurity and doubt once again. This is perhaps the greatest challenge for much contemporary theology since so many today, in spite of all their good intentions, do not actually allow the Word of God, namely, Jesus Christ himself to be the first and final Word in all their reflections upon God, faith, grace, revelation and truth itself. This is the problem of self-justification.

Faith and the knowledge of God

At the close of his ‘Strange New World’ lecture Barth notes that a whole new series of questions may arise about who God really is who meets us in the Bible and calls us to faith. While we might say that the content of the Bible is God himself, Barth asks, ‘what is the content of the contents?’Footnote ⁷⁰ And he lists a number of answers which, while true, are nonetheless inadequate because they may still represent the content of our wishes and not God himself as he comes to us, the Lord and Redeemer, the Saviour and Comforter of all who turn to him. The new world is the world of ‘incomparable peace of such a life hid with Christ in God’.Footnote ⁷¹ All of this and more Barth says is true. But it is not the whole truth because we must grow beyond the question, ‘Who is God?’

Barth's thinking here is similar to the way he began CD II/1 concerning our knowledge of God where he insisted that knowledge of the truth that takes place in faith never asks whether God is knownFootnote ⁷² because:

Accordingly, ‘Biblical faith excludes any faith of man in himself – that is any desire for religious self-help, any religious self-satisfaction, any religious self-sufficiency. Biblical faith lives upon the objectivity of God.’Footnote ⁷⁴ And because God can only be known in faith and by his own gracious self-revelation, true knowledge of God is ‘an event enclosed in the bosom of the divine Trinity’Footnote ⁷⁵ so that we really know God himself in our views and concepts as God enables us to participate in his own self-knowledge.

In his ‘Strange New World’ lecture Barth says that one who is led by God himself to ‘the gates of the new world, to the threshold of the kingdom of God . . . asks no longer. There one sees. There one hears. There one has. There one knows. There one no longer gives his petty, narrow little answers.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Anyone who is still asking ‘Who is God?’ has halted, refused to let the Bible speak and has ‘failed somewhere truly to desire – to believe. At the point of halt the truth again becomes unclear, confused, problematical – narrow, stupid, high-church, non-conformist, monotonous, or meaningless.’Footnote ⁷⁷ It is because of our unbelief that we are so perplexed by the question ‘Who is God?’ The answer the Bible gives is: ‘“He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” . . . when we find God in the Bible, when we dare with Paul not to be disobedient to the heavenly vision, then God stands before us as he really is. “Believing, ye shall receive!” God is God.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Even when we believe, however, we must still pray ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief’. Yet in the midst of our unbelief we may really know God through his grace and when we do know God we know him as the heavenly Father. But we know him as ‘the heavenly Father even upon earth, and upon earth really the heavenly Father’. This God does not allow his life to be divided between a here and a beyond and he will not ‘leave to death the task of freeing us from sin and sorrow. He will bless us, not with the power of the church, but with the power of life and resurrection. In Christ he caused his word to be made flesh.’ In Christ eternity has dawned upon time and he has in fact established a new world. Yet that is not the end of the story.

The Bible also tells us that God is God the Son who has become the Mediator for the entire world. He is the redeeming Word of God who existed in the beginning and is expected as the one who is coming again. He is the redeemer of humanity as it has gone astray and indeed he is the redeemer of all creation. It is in this sense that ‘all the events of the Bible are the beginning, the glorious beginning of a new world’.Footnote ⁷⁹ And the Bible tells us further that God is the ‘Spirit in his believers’ who

But it would be the greatest misunderstanding of Barth's intentions if one were to shift the weight of emphasis here away from the Spirit acting within us as the Lord and giver of life and onto our own new families and new relationships with the idea that wherever families are renewed and relationships change for the better there can be seen the kingdom of God.

Once again, any attempt to explore the meaning of our relationship with God, by focusing on ourselves as those justified and sanctified by the Holy Spirit through grace alone, means we have already ceased to live by grace and by faith.Footnote ⁸¹ Barth saw this critical point in a number of contexts with great clarity and his vision is worth noting today, especially when so many theologians seem to want to divide their loyalties between a strictly theological method that operates in faith, by allowing the object of faith – the triune God – to determine what is thought and said, and a method that allows our human experiences and insights to set the questions that faith is then supposed to answer. Barth's dogmatic theology is an application of his understanding of biblical faith; dogmatics itself is an act of faith that has ‘its basis in the divine predestination, the free act of God on man and his work’ which will enable dogmatic work but will always question it as well.Footnote ⁸² This questioning by the Word of God is not something that can be solved humanly speaking. That is why prayer is necessary. Prayer allows us to recognise that we can accomplish nothing by ourselves; it is not a means by which we can count on success in our work but an act of faith trusting completely in the Lord to enable our work.Footnote ⁸³

Knowledge of God too must be prayed for because only God can make himself known; here too faith, grace and revelation are indissolubly connected. Hence ‘The position of grace cannot be taken up and held in any other way than by asking and praying for it.’Footnote ⁸⁴ This means that knowledge of God takes place only as free obedience, that is, as a human decision that corresponds with God's decision concerning us.Footnote ⁸⁵ Hence,

Here we pray to be relieved of the many temptations that would lead away from clinging to grace alone for our knowledge of God. Interestingly, in his doctrine of Providence, Barth links faith, obedience and prayer in a similar way and concludes that when God guides creation he does so in the eternally rich activity of his Word and Spirit and ‘The eternal riches of God are the riches of His trinitarian life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’. Because of this ‘it is necessarily the case that the omnipotent operation of God not merely leaves the activity of the creature free, but continually makes it free’. It is because the triune God is eternally rich that in his works in his Word and Spirit ‘there is no reason whatever why the activity of the creature should be destroyed or suppressed by his omnipotent operation’.Footnote ⁸⁷ In what follows we shall explore some implications of such a biblically grounded dogmatic theology for our knowledge of God, focusing on the relation of religion and revelation.

Religious experience and self-justification – Paul Tillich

Contemporary theology often does not allow Jesus to have the first and final word. Frequently some form of self-justification or self-sanctification guides those who believe they can know God and thus also the truth of ‘religion’ by exploring peoples’ religious experiences. Some believe that Barth went too far in his critique of religion in CD I/2. Yet it is worth asking whether and to what extent those who believe this have embraced a view of religion that has already domesticated revelation in some subtle or overt way. T. F. Torrance accurately described Barth's theology ‘as the application of justification to the whole realm of man's life, to the realm of his knowing as well as the realm of his doing’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Let us compare some of what Barth says about the truth of religion and our knowledge of God with what Paul Tillich proposes when he sees faith as in some sense dictated by our ‘ultimate concern’.

Barth insists that ‘Revelation is understood only where we expect from it, and from it alone, the first and the last word about religion’Footnote ⁸⁹ and that even the slightest concession to ‘religionism’ in the attempt to understand religion theologically is fatal. What is the reason for this? It is the plain fact that Jesus alone is the Word of God incarnate. Hence

Importantly, Jesus’ humanity ‘has no hypostasis of its own’ because ‘It has it only in the Logos. The same is true, therefore, of the earthly-historical life of the Church and the children of God, and therefore of the Christian religion.’Footnote ⁹¹

By contrast, relying on depth psychology and exploring experiences of depth to understand God, Tillich claims:

Tillich's thinking embodies all that is wrong with an approach to theology which begins with religious experience and not with faith in Jesus Christ, and thus subverts the priority of revelation over religion.Footnote ⁹³

While Tillich assumes we can know the Christian God by exploring our experiences of depth; by equating our experience of depth with knowledge of God; and by concluding that we can change the word God as traditionally understood as long as we know that depth means God, faith knows God precisely as the eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit – as one who is hidden from any and all our experiences no matter how deep they may be. When God is truly known in an encounter with his Word through his Spirit as attested in scripture, one immediately knows that we cannot learn of God by exploring our experiences of depth. Such an approach is closed to us. Thus, any attempt to equate experiences of depth with knowledge of the triune God amounts to an overt reduction of theology to anthropology, and opens the door to a universalism that can claim knowledge of God without ever believing in God himself who is present to us in history in his Word and Spirit. As Barth insisted:

This is why grace, faith, revelation and truth are inextricably connected in Barth's theology. Faith is not something we create or can control since, as we have already seen, it is a specific freedom that comes miraculously from the Holy Spirit in particular circumstances. And, since this freedom comes to us and enables us to know God in truth and to act as those who have been liberated for service of the Word, this shows that there is no true knowledge of God outside of our relationship with God established and maintained by God himself in Christ and through the Holy Spirit. For Barth, ‘Christian experience . . . is true . . . to the extent that it lives entirely by Him and cannot curve in upon itself in self-sufficiency. It is true in and by its source, in and by Jesus Christ as its basis, upon which it is dependent but which is not dependent upon it.’Footnote ⁹⁵

John Haught

One can see the damaging nature of Tillich's thinking when one sees what John Haught makes of it. Citing Tillich, Haught reasons that ‘God may be “thought of” as the inexhaustible depth and ground out of which all of our experiences arise. We continually dwell in this depth without focusing upon it.’Footnote ⁹⁶ Hence, ‘religion may be understood as the search for depth’,Footnote ⁹⁷ but ‘religion is more than a search. For religion is also a confident naming of the dimension of depth.’ And conversion means ‘a new turn and a new confidence in the unending journey to the depth of our lives’.Footnote ⁹⁸ In sum Haught says

Such thinking seems to confirm the accuracy of Barth's understanding of religion as our attempt to create the God we want instead of living by faith and accepting God as he has acted for us in his Word and Spirit.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Haught's idea that religion is our confident search for depth demonstrates the truth of Barth's view that ‘religion is . . . thoroughly self-centered’Footnote ¹⁰¹ and cannot transcend the limit of experience; it thus reduces God to our knowledge of our own depth. In this sense a study of religion and religious experience leads directly to the conclusion that we can have a true knowledge of God without relying on the grace of God revealed in Christ.

John A. T. Robinson

John Robinson explicitly relies on Tillich's thinking and reaches the following questionable conclusions:

Consequently God ‘is to be found only in, with and under the conditioned relationships of this life: for he is their depth and ultimate significance’.Footnote ¹⁰³ No wonder T. F. Torrance believed Robinson's thinking was ‘unable to distinguish God from [our] own swollen subjectivity’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ and called him a ‘theological solipsist, who cannot see finally outside of himself or identify a God “out there” in distinction from the ground of his own being’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ By resorting to ‘pictorial images’ for God, Robinson's thinking becomes unscientific because it is a ‘failure to understand things out of themselves in accordance with their natures’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Torrance concludes that Robinson and other so-called ‘new theologians’

Barth's view of Robinson's Honest to God was similarly negative.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Both Torrance and Barth refused to allow grace to be detached from Jesus himself as the Word of God incarnate and located in the wider sphere of religious experience because they believed such universalism represented a Gnosticising of the Gospel. The thinking offered by Tillich, Haught and Robinson amounts to a form of self-justification excluded by the very nature of revelation as Barth understood it. Any such thinking undermines the intent and content of various Christian doctrines, not least of which is the doctrine of Trinity; indeed even trinitarian theology can become very misleading when placed within this Tillichian context.

Mark Heim

Let me illustrate this very briefly with several problematic remarks made by S. Mark Heim. First, he believes ‘The Trinity teaches us that Jesus Christ cannot be an exhaustive or exclusive source for knowledge of God nor the exhaustive and exclusive act of God to save us.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Compare this assertion to Barth's unequivocal remark that

Hence, the truth of the Christian religion is the fact that Christians may live by grace because ‘It is of grace that the Church and the children of God live by His grace’. Consequently, the Church lives ‘through the name of Jesus Christ’.Footnote ¹¹¹ This exclusivity is not meant to exclude other religions by way of competition because it is the action of the one, true and ever living God on behalf of all people, whatever their religious commitments may be.Footnote ¹¹² As a christological statement ‘It looks away from non-Christian and Christian alike to the One who sovereignly confronts and precedes both’.Footnote ¹¹³ Heim's claim that Jesus cannot be the exclusive source of our knowledge of God and the exclusive saving act of God at work in history amounts to a denial of the content and meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity, and not to an affirmation of it, and undermines soteriology. At the crucial point of Heim's trinitarian theology of religions, he exchanges the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the one Word of God for a religious approach that sees the doctrine of the Trinity as a way of affirming communion and relationality, so that he may use the doctrine to affirm the goodness of a plurality of religious ends.

Second, because his starting point for a theology of religions is not Jesus Christ and faith in him as the one Word of God and the unique saviour of the world, Heim then argues that ‘The communion Christ came to instigate is itself the fundamental instrument for understanding who Christ is.’Footnote ¹¹⁴ But if communion is the instrument for understanding who Christ is, then and to that extent it can no longer be Christ alone who is and remains the criterion of our thinking about communion, salvation and the Trinity. In this case the instrument clearly becomes religion and a study of religious ends that receive their truth not from the Word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ but from the degree of communion thought to be perceived by the inquirer. Whereas Barth insisted that all religion (including the Christian religion) is inherently unbelief because it refuses to allow Christ himself to be the starting point and norm for what is said about the truth of God and revelation, Heim claims that religions

The problematic nature of this statement can only be seen in faith when one acknowledges that the triune God relates with us according to his free choice and not at all according to ours. He justifies the ungodly. Barth thus insisted that because God is ‘both gracious and holy: gracious as He is holy and holy as He is gracious’ that ‘The freedom of grace is revealed in the fact that it is always manifest in judgment. But it is the freedom of grace which is revealed in this way.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ Importantly, however, for Barth, God is always present to us as one who is in opposition to us as we are.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Only the believer speaks of this opposition of grace; thus the truth of religion can only be recognised through faith and not by incorporating revelation into the context of a conception of communion dictated by anything or anyone other than Jesus Christ. Heim's thinking unfortunately leads him to assert that ‘Trinitarian conviction rules out the view that among all the possible claimed manifestations of God, one narrow strand alone is authentic.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ Here truth, in its identity with Jesus Christ, who is the truth, has been undercut at its root with the idea that the doctrine of the Trinity allows and commands us to recognise as valid a plurality of religious ends.

Heim even believes that other religions, with their very different ends, place their members in contact with dimensions of the triune God. On the one hand he argues that Islam finds the Christian doctrine of the Trinity offensive because Muslims think it introduces division into God. On the other hand he claims that ‘the Muslim religious end focuses on the personal “I” of the Trinity’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Yet, if the Muslim idea of God's oneness excludes the oneness in being between the Son and Father, how can Muslims in any sense be said to have recognised the ‘I’ of the Trinity? Whatever ‘I’ they have conceptualised, as long as the homoousion between the Father and Son is denied, it is certainly not the divine subject known by Christians through faith in Jesus Christ and by the power of his Holy Spirit.

What Heim describes as dimensions of the triune God, then, represent little more than aspects of the dimension of depth articulated by Tillich, Robinson and Haught. Accordingly, Heim's trinitarian theology of religions fails to allow God in Christ to determine his understanding of who God is. God is not just a ‘communion-nature’ as Heim believes. As three persons, one being, God's being is in communion. But communion is not God. Failure to make this distinction leads Heim to say:

But do we really have a life in common with God that is directly perceptible in this way without faith in Christ?

This is a relevant question when you consider Heim's statement that ‘I as a Christian do not deny that a Hindu may actually realise identity with the divine, with absolute Brahman. I regard this as in fact identity with the underlying immanence of the triune God.’Footnote ¹²¹ Yet, the only way this could be true is if divine and human being and action are identified so that our relationality gives us something in common with God. Moreover, in light of biblical revelation and faith, this thinking fails to acknowledge that God's immanence is identical only with his immanence in his Word and Spirit. It is not an immanence that can be seen or described apart from faith in Christ himself – a faith which itself comes only from the Holy Spirit. In faith one discovers that ‘If the freedom of divine immanence is sought and supposedly found apart from Jesus Christ, it can signify in practice only our enslavement to a false god.’Footnote ¹²² For Barth, the God we grasp at in religion is a sign of our unbelief, our sin, our sloth and therefore our attempt to render innocuous the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Christ causes offence because of his exclusive claim on us. The God of religion does not. So we are ‘basically illuminated and radically questioned and disturbed and therefore offended by the deity of God in the concrete phenomenon of the existence of this man’.Footnote ¹²³ And yet, as I have argued in this article, following Barth's thinking, faith, grace, revelation and truth are so indissolubly connected according to the biblical witness that both religion and trinitarian theology itself are necessarily and always directed away from all self-chosen agendas, no matter how universally appealing, and towards faith in the Word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ who, as the grace of God manifested in history, alone is the truth who promises to give meaning to our thinking – but only on his terms and not at all on ours – no matter how offensive that may be.