The discovery of the central significance of eschatology for the message and existence of Jesus and for early Christianity, which had its beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century in Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer, is undoubtedly one of the most important events in recent Protestant theology. It had a shattering effect, and was like an earthquake shaking the foundations not only of scientific theology, but also of the Church, of piety and of faith as existing within the framework of nineteenth-century Protestant culture. Long before world wars and revolutions had awakened the Western consciousness of crisis, theologians like Ernst Troeltsch had the as yet hardly comprehended impression that ‘everything is tottering’. The recognition of the eschatological character of early Christianity made it clear that the automatically accepted idea of a harmonious synthesis between Christianity and culture was a lie (Franz Overbeck). In this world with its assured and axiomatic religious positions in the realm of thought and will, Jesus appeared as a stranger with an apocalyptic message that was foreign to it. At the same time there arose a feeling of estrangement and a sense of the lost and critical state of this world. ‘The floods are rising—the dams are bursting’, said Martin Kähler. It is all the more astonishing that the ‘new’ element in the discovery of the eschatological dimension of the whole Christian message was considered to represent for traditional Christianity in its present and existing form only a ‘crisis’ which had to be assimilated, mastered and overcome. None of the discoverers took his discovery really seriously. The so-called ‘consistent eschatology’ was never really consistent, and has therefore led a peculiar shadow-existence to this day. The very concepts in which attempts were made to comprehend the peculiarity of the eschatological message of Jesus manifest a typical and almost helpless inadequacy. Johannes Weiss in his pioneer work, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, in 1892 formulated his insight as follows: ‘The kingdom of God is in Jesus’ view an absolutely supra-worldly factor which stands in exclusive contrast to this world.… The ethico-religious use of this concept in recent theology, which wholly strips it of its original eschatological and apocalyptic sense, is unjustified. It is only seemingly biblical, for it uses the expression in a different sense from Jesus.’ As compared with the picture of Jesus advanced by his father-in-law Albrecht Ritschl, this statement provides a sharp antithesis. But is the ‘supra-worldly’ already the ‘eschatological’? Jesus here no longer appears as the moral teacher of the Sermon on the Mount, but with his eschatological message he becomes an apocalyptic fanatic. ‘He has nothing more in common with this world, he has one foot already in the next.’ Thus after his sally into the no-man’s-land of eschatology Johannes Weiss returned again at once to the liberal picture of Jesus.
It was no different with Albert Schweitzer. The greatness of his work lay in the fact that he took seriously the foreignness of Jesus and his message as compared with all the liberal nineteenth-century pictures of Jesus. ‘Eschatology makes it impossible to attribute modern ideas to Jesus and then by way of “New Testament Theology” take them back from Him as a loan, as even Ritschl not so long ago did with such naïveté.’ But the startling thing about Schweitzer’s work on the other hand is that he had no eschatological sense at all—neither for theological nor for philosophical eschatology. The consequences which he drew from his discovery of the apocalyptic of Jesus were aimed at the final conquest and annihilation of what he considered an illusionary eschatologism. His philosophy of life and of culture is governed by the overcoming of that painful impression which he described as follows in the first edition of his Quest of the Historical Jesus: ‘There is silence all around. The Baptist appears and cries: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign.’ The ‘wheel of history’, symbol of the eternal recurrence of the same cycle, takes the place of the eschatological arrow-flight of history. The experience of two thousand years of delayed parousia makes eschatology impossible today.
After the first World War the founders of ‘dialectical theology’ took the eschatology that had thus been suppressed by idealism and condemned to ineffectiveness, and set it in the centre not only of exegetical but now also of dogmatic study. In the second edition of his Römerbrief, Karl Barth in 1921 makes the programmatic announcement: ‘If Christianity be not altogether and unreservedly eschatology, there remains in it no relationship whatever to Christ.’ Yet what is the meaning of ‘eschatology’ here? It is not history, moving silently and interminably onwards, that brings a crisis upon men’s eschatological hopes of the future, as Albert Schweitzer said, but on the contrary it is now the eschaton, breaking transcendentally into history, that brings all human history to its final crisis. This, however, makes the eschaton into a transcendental eternity, the transcendental meaning of all ages, equally near to all the ages of history and equally far from all of them. Whether eternity was understood in transcendental terms, as in Barth, who spoke of the unhistorical, supra-historical or ‘proto-historical’, or whether the eschaton was understood in existentialist terms, as in Bultmann, who spoke of the ‘eschatological moment’, or whether it was axiologically understood, as in Paul Althaus, who saw ‘every wave of the sea of time break as it were on the strand of eternity’,—everywhere in these years, even as they strove to get the better of the historic eschatology which was construed by religion in terms of saving history and by secularism in terms of belief in progress, men became the victims of a transcendental eschatology which once again obscured rather than developed the discovery of early Christian eschatology. It was precisely the transcendentalist view of eschatology that prevented the break-through of eschatological dimensions in dogmatics. Thus all that remains as the outcome of the ‘eschatological struggle of today’ is in the first instance the unsatisfactory result that there certainly exists a Christian eschatology which sees history in terms of saving history and regards eschatology as concerned merely with the final, closing events of history, that there certainly exists a transcendental eschatology, for which the eschaton as good as means the transcendental ‘present of eternity’, and that there exists an eschatology interpreted in existentialist terms, for which the eschaton is the crisis of kerygmatic involvement, but that Christian eschatology is not yet by any means in a position to break through the categories which provide the framework of these forms of thinking. This, however, is the inescapable task of theological thought, if the ‘discovery’ sixty years ago of the eschatological message of early Christianity is to be properly understood and is to involve consequences for theology and for the existence of the Church.
Now these forms of thinking, in which the real language of eschatology is still obscured today, are entirely the thought forms of the Greek mind, which sees in the logos the epiphany of the eternal present of being and finds the truth in that. Even where the modern age thinks in Kantian terms, this conception of truth is at bottom intended. The real language of Christian eschatology, however, is not the Greek logos, but the promise which has stamped the language, the hope and the experience of Israel. It was not in the logos of the epiphany of the eternal present, but in the hope-giving word of promise that Israel found God’s truth. That is why history was here experienced in an entirely different and entirely open form. Eschatology as a science is therefore not possible in the Greek sense, nor yet in the sense of modern experimental science, but only as a knowledge in terms of hope, and to that extent as a knowledge of history and of the historic character of truth. These differences between Greek thought and that of Israel and Christianity, between logos and promise, between epiphany and apokalypsis of the truth have today been made clear in many fields and by various methods. And yet Georg Picht is right when he says, ‘The epiphany of the eternal present of being distorts to this day the eschatological revelation of God.’ In order to attain to a real understanding of the eschatological message, it is accordingly necessary to acquire an openness and understanding vis-à-vis what ‘promise’ means in the Old and New Testaments, and how in the wider sense a form of speech and thought and hope that is determined by promise experiences God, truth, history and human nature. It is further necessary to pay attention to the continual controversies in which the promise-centred faith of Israel found itself, in every field of life, engaged with the epiphany-based religions of the world about it, and in which its own truth came to light. The controversies continue also through the New Testament, especially where Christianity encountered the Greek mind. They are part of Christianity’s task also today—and that, too, not only in what modern theology has to say for itself, but also in reflecting on the world and in the experience of history. Christian eschatology in the language of promise will then be an essential key to the unlocking of Christian truth. For the loss of eschatology—not merely as an appendix to dogmatics, but as the medium of theological thinking as such—has always been the condition that makes possible the adaptation of Christianity to its environment and, as a result of this, the self-surrender of faith. Just as in theological thought the blending of Christianity with the Greek mind made it no longer clear which God was really being spoken of, so Christianity in its social form took over the heritage of the ancient state religion. It installed itself as the ‘crown of society’ and its ‘saving centre’, and lost the disquieting, critical power of its eschatological hope. In place of what the Epistle to the Hebrews describes as an exodus from the fixed camp and the continuing city, there came the solemn entry into society of a religious transfiguration of the world. These consequences, too, have to be borne in mind if we are to attain to a liberation of eschatological hope from the forms of thought and modes of conduct belonging to the traditional syntheses of the West.
In addressing ourselves to the combined topic of ‘promise’ and ‘revelation’ the purpose is not only to enquire into the relation between the two, but also to develop a view of the ‘revelation of God’ which is ‘eschatological’ in so far as it seeks to discover the language of promise. The concepts of revelation in systematic theology have been fashioned throughout in adoption of, and controversy with, the Greek metaphysic of the proofs of God. ‘Revelation theology’ today consequently stands in emphatic antithesis to so-called ‘natural theology’. That means, however, that these concepts of revelation are constantly preoccupied with the question of whether or not God can be proved. On this front, a theology of revelation can ally itself with a negative natural theology and be derived from the dogma of the non-provability of God. But a concept of revelation arrived at in this way is threatened with the loss of all its content. Its reduction of everything to the problem of the knowledge of God brings about the much lamented formalism of revelation theology.
But now the more recent theology of the Old Testament has indeed shown that the words and statements about the ‘revealing of God’ in the Old Testament are combined throughout with statements about the ‘promise of God’. God reveals himself in the form of promise and in the history that is marked by promise. This confronts systematic theology with the question whether the understanding of divine revelation by which it is governed must not be dominated by the nature and trend of the promise. The examination in the field of comparative religion of the special peculiarity of Israelite faith is today bringing out ever more strongly the difference between its ‘religion of promise’ and the epiphany religions of the revealed gods of the world around Israel. These epiphany religions are all ‘religions of revelation’ in their own way. Any place in the world can become the epiphany of the divine and the pictorial transparency of the deity. The essential difference here is accordingly not between the so-called nature gods and a God of revelation, but between the God of the promise and the gods of the epiphanies. Thus the difference does not lie already in the assertion of divine ‘revelation’ as such, but in the different ways of conceiving and speaking of the revelation and self-manifestation of the deity. The decisively important question is obviously that of the context in which the talk of revelation arises. It is one thing to ask: where and when does an epiphany of the divine, eternal, immutable and primordial take place in the realm of the human, temporal and transient? And it is another thing to ask: when and where does the God of the promise reveal his faithfulness and in it himself and his presence? The one question asks about the presence of the eternal, the other about the future of what is promised. But if promise is determinative of what is said of the revealing of God, then every theological view of biblical revelation contains implicitly a governing view of eschatology. Then, however, the Christian doctrine of the revelation of God must explicitly belong neither to the doctrine of God—as an answer to the proofs of God or to the proof of his non-provability—nor to anthropology—as an answer to the question of God as asked by man and given along with the questionableness of human existence. It must be eschatologically understood, namely, in the field of the promise and expectation of the future of the truth. The question of the understanding of the world in the light of God and of man in the light of God—this was the concern of the proofs of God—can be answered only when it is plain which God is being spoken of, and in what way or with what purpose and intention he reveals himself. We shall therefore have to take some of the concepts of revelation in more recent systematic theology and examine them first in regard to the view of eschatology by which they are governed and secondly in regard to their immanent links with traditional proofs of God.
The other reason for understanding revelation in the light of promise arises from the theology of the Reformers. The correlate of faith is for the Reformers not an idea of revelation, but is expressly described by them as the promissio dei: fides et promissio sunt correlativa. Faith is called to life by promise and is therefore essentially hope, confidence, trust in the God who will not lie but will remain faithful to his promise. For the Reformers, indeed, the gospel is identical with promissio. It was only in Protestant orthodoxy that under the constraint of the question of reason and revelation, nature and grace, the problem of revelation became the central theme of dogmatic prolegomena. It was only when theology began to employ a concept of reason and a concept of nature which were not derived from a view of the promise but were now taken over from Aristotle, that the problem of revelation appeared in its familiar form. There arose that dualism of reason and revelation which made theological talk of revelation increasingly irrelevant for man’s knowledge of reality and his dealings with it. The result of this unhappy story is, that our task is to set the subject of divine revelation no longer in antithesis to man’s momentary understanding of the world and of himself, but to take this very understanding of self and the world up into, and open its eyes for, the eschatological outlook in which revelation is seen as promise of the truth.
The formalism which is everywhere so striking in the modern concept of revelation has its ground in the approach which adopts the seemingly perfectly natural method of deriving the theological content of ‘revelation’ from the word ‘revelation’. ‘In general, we understand by revelation the disclosure of what is veiled, the opening up of what is hidden’ (R. Bultmann). ‘In the New Testament, ἀποκαλύπτειν refers to the removing of a veil, φανεροῦν to the emerging of the hidden, δηλοῦν to the making known of what is otherwise unknown, and γνωρίζειν to the imparting of what is otherwise not available’ (O. Weber). ‘A closed door is opened, a covering is taken away. In the darkness light dawns, a question finds its answer, a riddle its solution’ (K. Barth). This general explanation of the word then results for Bultmann in what for him is the decisive question whether revelation is an importation of knowledge or an event which transposes me into a new state of my self. As long as every man knows of his death, and his existence is placed by it in a state of radical questionableness, he can also know in advance what revelation and life is. God’s revelation proves to be an event affecting the peculiar existence of the particular individual, and therewith an answer to the question raised by the questionableness of his being. Barth on the other hand defined the general use of the word revelation in the Christian sense by saying that here revelation is the self-revelation of the Creator of all that is, of the Lord of all being, and hence transcendent self-revelation of God. While Bultmann endeavours to bring out as against the supra-naturalistic orthodox concept of revelation the fact that revelation has the character of an event in history, Barth was concerned for the absolute independence, unprovability, underivability and incomparability of the self-revelation of God. Just as Bultmann developed his understanding of revelation within the framework of a new proof of God from existence, so the concept of the self-revelation of God developed by Barth corresponds with Anselm’s ontological proof of God as interpreted in his book Fides quaerens intellectum (1930). This book on Anselm contains highly significant prolegomena to the Church Dogmatics. This means, however, that both writers are wrestling with specific theological traditions and find in the concept of revelation the starting point for a new way of speaking of the revelation of God, without first asking what is the reference and bearing of the words for the revelation of God in the Old and New Testaments. To set out from a general explanation of terms means to let these expressions remain in the first instance where they originally belong, i.e. where they stand in the epiphany religions. It then becomes all the more difficult later on to discover specifically in the ‘revelation of God’ the new content of the biblical proclamation. Too little attention is paid to the fact that the expressions for ‘revelation’ in the biblical scriptures have completely broken out of their original religious context and are employed with a meaning of a different kind. This different kind of meaning is mainly determined by the events of promise.
What is the underlying view of eschatology which governs and dominates the concept of the ‘self-revelation of God’ as found in Barth, and the understanding of revelation as the ‘disclosure of authentic selfhood’ as found in Bultmann?
We shall find that the idea of self-revelation both in its theological and in its anthropological form has been formulated under the spell of a ‘transcendental eschatology’. I choose the expression ‘transcendental eschatology’, which Jakob Taubes and Hans Urs von Balthasar have used to designate Immanuel Kant’s doctrine of the end, because it accords better than the usual designation ‘presentative eschatology’ with the categories of thought in which the corresponding view of revelation is here formulated.
Within the framework of a transcendental eschatology, the question of the future and the goal of revelation is answered by means of a reflection: the wherefore and the whence are the same, the goal of revelation is identical with its origin. If God reveals nothing other than ‘himself’, then the goal and the future of his revelation lies in himself. If revelation happens to man’s self, then its goal is that man should attain to his authenticity and primordiality, that is, to himself. This means, however, that revelation and the eschaton coincide in either case in the point which is designated God’s or man’s ‘self’. Revelation does not then open up a future in terms of promise, nor does it have any future that would be greater than itself, but revelation of God is then the coming of the eternal to man or the coming of man to himself. It is precisely this reflection on the transcendent ‘self’ that makes eschatology a transcendental eschatology. ‘Revelation’ consequently becomes the apocalypse of the transcendent subjectivity of God or of man.
The classical philosophical form of transcendental eschatology is found in Immanuel Kant. Its basic features recur whereever Kantian thinking is found in the revelational theology of modern times. In his short, almost forgotten treatise on Das Ende aller Dinge (1794), Kant addressed himself to the eschatology of the eighteenth century as expressed in terms of cosmology and saving history, and subjected it to a critique corresponding to his great critiques of theological metaphysics. There can be no such thing as an intellectual knowledge of the ‘last things’, since these ‘objects … lie wholly beyond our field of vision’. It is therefore idle to ‘brood over what they are in themselves and in essence’. Taken as particular objects accessible to the intellect, they are ‘wholly void’. No provable and convincing knowledge of them can be attained. Yet they are not for that reason to be considered ‘void’ in every respect. For what the intellect finds itself certainly bound to dismiss as null and void, acquires through the practical reason a significance of its own that is highly existential, namely moral. The ideas of the last things have therefore to be ethically examined, and considered in the sphere of the moral reason, of the practical ability to be a self. The method will be to start as if we had ‘here to do merely with ideas … which reason creates for itself’, as if we were ‘playing’ with ideas which ‘are given us by the legislative reason itself with a practical purpose’, in order to reflect on them according to ‘moral principles concerned with the ultimate goal of all things’.
Now with this critical appropriation of traditional eschatological ideas Kant has not only brought about an ethical reduction of eschatology. Rather, its immediate effect is, that through excluding the eschatological categories of hope, the reality appearing to, and perceptible by, the theoretic reason can now be rationalized on the basis of eternal conditions of possible experience. If the eschata are supra-sensible and as such beyond all possibility of knowledge, then eschatological perspectives are in turn also completely irrelevant for the knowledge of the world of experience. ‘And since our intuition is always sensible, no object can ever be given to us in experience which does not conform to the condition of time.’ Whereas for Herder eschatology still meant the inner impetus and the orientation towards the future of a dynamically open cosmos of all living things, Kant has the sensual impression of a ‘world machine’ and a ‘mechanism of nature’. The res gestae of history are consequently for the intellect the same in principle as the res extensae of nature. Thus along with cosmological eschatology his criticism applies also to every conceivable eschatology expressed in terms of history and saving history. It is not simply that its place is taken by an ethical eschatology of moral ends. That is only one consequence. Rather, the eschata form themselves into eternal, transcendental conditions for the possibility of experiencing oneself in a practical way. Man, who ‘as belonging to the sensuous world recognizes himself to be necessarily subject to the laws of causality’, nevertheless becomes ‘in practical matters, in his other aspect as a being in himself, conscious of his existence as determinable in an intelligible order of things’. In moral action man gets ‘beyond the mechanism of blindly working causes’ ‘into an order of things totally other than that of a mere mechanism of nature’. He attains to the non-objective, non-objectifiable realm of freedom and of ability to be a self. Thus, as Hans Urs von Balthasar aptly remarks, ‘transcendental philosophy becomes the method towards inward apocalypse’. In place of cosmological and historic eschatologies comes the practical realization of eschatological existence.
G. W. F. Hegel in his early treatise Glauben und Wissen with the sub-title oder die Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjektivität (1802) has impressively described his dissatisfaction with the results of this reflective philosophy:
The great form of the world spirit, however, which has discovered itself in these philosophies, is the principle of the North and, from the religious point of view, of Protestantism, the subjectivity in which beauty and truth presents itself in feelings and dispositions, in love and understanding. Religion builds its temples and altars in the heart of the individual, and sighs and prayers seek the God whose contemplation is forbidden because there is always the danger of the intellect, which would see the contemplated object as a thing, the forest as firewood. It is true that the inward must also become outward, the intention attain to reality in action, the immediate religious feeling express itself in outward movement, and the faith that flees the objectivity of knowledge take objective form in thoughts, concepts and words; but the objective is very carefully distinguished by the intellect from the subjective, and it is the element which has no value and is nothing, just as the struggle of subjective beauty must be precisely to take all due precautions against the necessity of the subjective’s becoming objective.… It is precisely as a result of its fleeing the finite and holding fast to subjectivity that it finds the beautiful turned altogether into things, the forest into firewood, pictures into things that have eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear, while the ideals that cannot be taken in wholly intelligible reality like sticks and stones become fabrications of the imagination and every relation to them is seen as empty play, or as dependence on objects and as superstition.
This critique of the reflective philosophy of Kant’s transcendental subjectivity Hegel later developed further in his critique of romanticism. In doing so he had in view what has been called the ‘dual track in the history of modern thought’ (J. Ritter) in which Descartes’ methodizing approach to world experience is inevitably joined dialectically by Pascal’s logique du cœur, the rational system of the Enlightenment by aesthetic subjectivity, historical scepticism by the non-historical mysticism of the solitary soul, the positivism of a science that is independent of values (Max Weber) by the appealing tones of the philosophy of existence (Karl Jaspers). For theology, this resulted in the dilemma that according as the story of Christ became for the intellect an ‘accidental truth of history’, so faith was transformed into an immediate contemplation of ‘eternal truths of reason’—that according as the proclamation in history degenerated into the ‘mere historical faith of the Church’, so faith exalted itself into the ‘pure, immediately God-given faith of reason’. Hegel here perceived that both elements in this process, objectification and subjectivity, are abstract products of reflective philosophy and therefore dialectically condition each other. Both involve a negation and a break-away from history: ‘The world has congealed, as it were, it is not a sea of being, but a being that has turned into mechanical clockwork.’ A new concept of the cosmos in terms of natural science obscures the experience of reality as history; while on the other hand human existence pales to an ineffable, solitary subjectivity, which must flee all contact with reality and all concessions towards it in order to abide by itself. This cleavage into objectification and subjectivity is not to be escaped—nor can theology escape it in bringing the gospel to the modern world—by declaring one side of this kind of thinking to be vain, deficient, corrupt and decadent. Rather, theology will have to take the hardened antitheses and make them fluid once more, to mediate in the contradiction between them and reconcile them. That, however, is only possible when the category of history, which drops out in this dualism, is rediscovered in such a way that it does not deny the antithesis in question, but spans it and understands it as an element in an advancing process. The revelation of God can neither be presented within the framework of the reflective philosophy of transcendental subjectivity, for which history is reduced to the ‘mechanism’ of a closed system of causes and effects, nor can it be presented in the anachronism of a theology of saving history, for which the ‘forest’ has not yet become ‘firewood’ and ‘sacred history’ has not yet been subjected to critical historical thinning. Rather, the essential thing will be to make these abstract products of the modern denial of history fluid once more, and to understand them as forms assumed in history by the spirit in the course of an eschatological process which is kept in hope and in motion by the promise grounded in the cross and resurrection of Christ. The conditions of possible experience which were understood by Kant in a transcendental sense must be understood instead as historically flowing conditions. It is not that time at a standstill is the category of history, but the history which is experienced from the eschatological future of the truth is the category of time.
Karl Barth gave as one of the reasons for the complete recasting of his commentary on Romans in the second edition of 1921 the fact that he was indebted to his brother Heinrich Barth for ‘better acquaintance with the real orientation of the ideas of Plato and Kant’. It will be owing to this influence that the eschatology which in the first edition of 1919 was not unfriendly towards dynamic and cosmic perspectives retreated from now on into the background of Barth’s thinking, and that early dialectical theology set to work in terms of the dialectic of time and eternity and came under the bane of the transcendental eschatology of Kant. Here ‘end’ came to be the equivalent of ‘origin’, and the eschaton became the transcendental boundary of time and eternity. ‘Being the transcendent meaning of all moments, the eternal “Moment” can be compared with no moment in time’, says Barth in comment on Rom. 13:12: ‘The night is far spent, the day is at hand.’ ‘Of the real end of history it may be said at any time: The end is near!’ His exposition of 1 Cor. 15 shows a corresponding lack of interest in an eschatology that deals with the history of the end: ‘The history of the end must be for him [the radical biblical thinker] synonymous with the pre-history, the limits of time of which he speaks must be the limits of all and every time and thus necessarily the origin of time.’
From the point of view of the history of philosophy this transcendental eschatology was working with a combination of Ranke’s saying that ‘every epoch has an immediate relation to God’ and Kierkegaard’s dictum that ‘where the eternal is concerned there is only one time: the present’. ‘Every moment in time bears within it the unborn secret of revelation, and every moment can thus be qualified’, said Barth in 1922, and Bultmann in 1958 in the last paragraph of History and Eschatology says the same in almost the same words—though to be sure with the addition, ‘You must awaken it.’
What do these eschatological statements—if we would call them ‘eschatological’—imply for the understanding of the revelation of God?
Karl Barth’s doctrine of the ‘self-revelation’ of God was first developed in detail in 1925 in his essay on ‘The Principles of Dogmatics according to Wilhelm Herrmann’, in taking up and surmounting the celebrated ‘self’ of Herrmann. The idea of ‘self-revelation’ has a previous history in the nineteenth century in the school of the Hegelian theologians. For the twentieth century, however, and especially for Barth and Bultmann, the emphasizing of ‘self’ in connection with revelation comes from Herrmann, whose pupils both of them were in Marburg. Without entering further into Hermann’s theology, we can preface our enquiry here by a quotation from his book Gottes Offenbarung an uns (1908), in order to indicate the problem involved in the idea of ‘self-revelation’: ‘We have no other means of knowing God except that he reveals himself to us ourselves by acting upon us.’
With the actualism which in this statement links together revelation, action, and knowledge of God, Barth and Bultmann are in agreement. The question—not for the understanding of the statement as Herrmann meant it, but for the point at which Barth and Bultmann start with, and depart from, Herrmann—is how the content is to be understood. Does the statement mean that God himself must reveal himself to us, or that God must reveal himself to us ourselves? Does the ‘self’ of the self-revelation refer essentially to God or to man?
What Herrmann meant by this statement is plain. Revelation is not instruction, and not an emotional impulse. Revelation of God cannot be objectively explained, but it can certainly be experienced in man’s own self, namely, in the non-objectifiable subjectivity of the dark, defenceless depths in which we live the moment of involvement. The revealing of God in his working upon ourselves is therefore as unfathomable, as non-derivable, as much grounded in itself as the living of life, which no one can explain, but everyone can experience. That is why no catchword is more characteristic of the theology of Herrmann than the word ‘self’ in an anthropological sense. Barth, however, argues in his essay that the word ‘self’ in this sense cannot after all be the last word in the theology of revelation. ‘Herrmann knows that one does not “experience” God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the mystery of God. “Even where he reveals himself, God continues to dwell in darkness.” ’ Precisely when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, he says, there appears a reservation even in Herrmann, despite all the emphasis on our own personal experience. Whether this is true of Herrmann need not concern us here. For the development of Barth’s theology it is important that he starts at this point, and goes on by putting the subjectivity of God in place of the subjectivity of man which Herrmann means by ‘self’. He asks whether in speaking of ‘the majesty of the Triune God’, we have not to think of ‘the unabrogable subjectivity of God, who exclusively determines himself, and is knowable exclusively through himself in the “purest act” (actus purissimus) of his Triune Personality’. ‘The lion breaks his cage; a wholly different “Self” has stepped on to the scene with his own validity.’ ‘Man asks about his “self” only because and if God is pleased to give him knowledge of his “Self”, only because and if God’s Word is spoken to him. Dogmatics should begin with “God said” (Deus dixit), repudiating the wholly futile attempt to recover it, if at all, only as a mere “reflection of faith” on the heights of some alleged “experience” (as if there were such a thing as an “experience” of it!).’ For Barth, the science of theology is accordingly grounded not in religious experience, but in the autopistia of Christian truth, in the fact that it is grounded in itself, and ‘what is already established can well be left without proof’.
Herrmann—this was his Kantian heritage—had taken it to be self-evident that revelation cannot be objectively grounded, proved to the theoretic reason. The non-objectifiability of God and the non-objectifiability of each peculiar existence or each peculiar ‘self’ constituted one and the same mystery for him. The ungroundable character of God and the ungroundable character and gratuité of life that is lived merged for him into one. That is why he held knowledge of God to be the ‘defenceless expression of religious experience’. He saw the ‘danger’ of the intellect and of objectification precisely as Hegel had described it. ‘Everything that science can grasp is—dead.’ ‘To know a thing is to gain control of it, to make it serviceable to us. The living world, inaccessible as it is to science … is disclosed to us through self-reflection, i.e. through honest reflection on what we in actual fact experience.’ For that reason we cannot say of God what he himself objectively is, but only what effect he has on ourselves.
For Barth, however, this defenceless non-groundability of religious experience cannot yet claim the required autopistia and autousia, but can only be a pointer towards the ground that is really grounded in itself, that ‘is never in any sense “object”, but is always unchangeably subject’. It is the sovereignty of the self-existent God in contrast and in counter to all propositions of man’s consciousness. Nor does the negative talk of the non-provability, the non-groundability and the non-objectifiability of God yet achieve that change of thought which Barth demands—the change to the transcendental subjectivity, expressed in trinitarian terms, of the God who reveals himself to man in the act of the Deus dixit. It is a change of thought that was foreshadowed in the ontological proof of God in Anselm and then executed by Hegel, and was later carried further by Barth in the idea of the self-revelation of God in his name.
In this way Herrmann’s ‘self’ acquires in Barth a theological form. Yet it should be noted that it still retains all the attributes, all the relations and distinctions, in which it had been formulated by Herrmann.
God cannot be proved, neither from the cosmos nor from the depths of human existence. He proves himself through himself. His revelation is the proof of God given by God himself. No one reveals God but himself alone. Who this God is, is first learned from his revelation. He reveals not this and that, but himself. By being the one who acts in his revelation, God is the one who describes himself. God cannot be commended and defended in his self-revelation, but he can only be believed—and that, too, as a result of his making himself credible. His word, in which he himself is present, cannot and need not be proved. It vindicates itself. Where the knowledge of God stood in Herrmann as the ‘defenceless expression of religious experience’, there we now have the self-revelation of God in the proclamation of the Deus dixit in the same defencelessness—namely, non-groundable and therefore indestructible, unprovable and therefore irrefutable, grounding and proving itself.
Now all these reflections on the subjectivity of God could also be sublime speculations on God. Barth, however, when he speaks of the self-revelation of God, would speak of nothing else but ‘that little bundle of reports’ on the existence of Jesus Christ which date from the days of the Roman Empire. But it is just here, where this history is concerned, that there arises a series of questions:
Does ‘self-revelation of God’ mean God’s eternal self-understanding? Does the doctrine of the Trinity mean the eternal trinitarian reflection of God upon himself? Does ‘self-revelation’ mean the pure present of the eternal, without history or future? The adoption of the term ‘self’ still retains even in the idea of the self-revelation of God its old reflective note from the thought of Herrmann. It contains the reflection that arises when God can no longer be proved from the world after the manner of the proofs of God, and it is to that extent a polemic term encumbered by the problem complex of the provability of God. It is therefore difficult to apply it to that bundle of reports about Jesus of Nazareth, for these statements and communications did not arise in the realm of the Greek metaphysics of the proofs of God, but in a wholly different context.
In itself it would here be a simple matter to transfer to God the structures of personality, personal selfhood, personal self-reflection and self-disclosure. Barth, however, did not take this path towards theological personalism, but developed the idea of self-revelation in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity and linked it with the proclamation of the lordship of God. The doctrine of the Trinity results from the developing of the self-revelation, i.e. from the questions of the subject, predicate and object of the event, Deus dixit. God himself is the revealer, the act of revealing, and the revealed. Whereas in the first outline of Barth’s dogmatics, in his Christliche Dogmatik I (1927), Herrmann’s idea of subjectivity is still dominant, in the Church Dogmatics I/ı (1932) it recedes in favour of a detailed doctrine of the immanent Trinity. Yet even here the immanent form of the divine Trinity appears to give the revelation of God the character of transcendental exclusiveness as a ‘self-contained novum’. What seems in this context to be more important than the trinitarian development of the self-revelation of God is the connecting of it with the ‘lordship of God’. That God reveals ‘himself’ means that he reveals himself ‘as God and Lord’. Self-revelation accordingly does not mean for Barth personalistic self-disclosure of God after the analogy of the I-Thou relationship between men. God reveals himself in actual fact as ‘somebody’ and ‘something’ for man, not as pure, absolute Thou. That would in any case, like the individual, be ‘ineffable’. He reveals himself ‘as’ the Lord. The announcing of the basileia is the concrete content of the revelation. The meaning of God’s lordship, however, is again to be learned from his concrete action in relation to man in his revelation, so that here, too, act and content still fall together in the first instance. What does ‘self-revelation’ mean in this context? It means that in his revelation God does not disguise himself, does not appear behind a mask, does not identify himself with something other than what he himself is—that what he reveals himself as, he is ‘beforehand in himself’—that consequently in the revelation of God as the Lord, man has to do with God himself, can depend on himself. Thus in revealing ‘something’ (his lordship) and ‘somebody’ (namely, himself in his Son), God reveals himself.
Once this connection is realized, then G. Gloege’s and W. Pannenberg’s criticism of Barth’s theology of self-revelation, in which they suspect a gnostic use of terms and a modern personalism, proves to be unjust. But then W. Kreck’s interpretation of self-revelation also appears questionable: ‘We must therefore here abide by Barth’s fundamental epistemological proposition: God (and therefore also man as God’s creature and image) can be known only through God.’ Kreck sets this proposition in antithesis to any knowledge of God by way of the analogia entis. This well-known proposition, however, is not one of Christian theology, but has its source in Neoplatonic gnosticism, appears in the reflections of mediaeval mysticism, and is found also in Hegel’s philosophy of religion. Taken in itself, it represents the highest stage of the self-reflection of the Absolute that was attained within the sphere of Greek philosophy of religion. On this principle the question of revelation and of knowledge of God would form a closed circle which is strictly speaking impenetrable. It is not applicable to that bundle of historic reports from which Christian faith lives, but rather to an esoteric gnosis. ‘Revelation’, however, must at once involve the crossing of the boundary between like and unlike, if it is to be revelation. Where there is knowledge of God on the ground of revelation, we should sooner have to assert the opposite principle: only unlikes know each other. God is known only by non-God, namely by man, as ‘God’ and ‘Lord’. Now of course Kreck in this proposition is thinking of pneumatology: ‘No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12:3). But this Spirit has his place in the event of Christ and in the word, not in a divine circle supra nos. The immanent form of the doctrine of the Trinity is always in danger of obscuring the historical and eschatological character of the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of the resurrection of the dead.
Barth later himself revised the transcendental eschatology of his dialectical phase. ‘It showed that although I was confident to treat the beyondness of the coming kingdom with absolute seriousness, I had no such confidence in relation to its coming as such.’ On the passage we quoted from the commentary on Rom. 13:12 he now says: ‘It is also clear that … I missed the distinctive feature of the passage, the teleology which it ascribes to time as it moves towards a real end.… The one thing that remained as the only tangible result was precisely that one-sided supra-temporal understanding of God which I had set out to combat.’ That, however, surely means that in this ‘supra-temporal understanding’ the truth of God, in regard both to the concept of the eschaton and to the concept of revelation, had been taken as epiphany of the eternal present and not as apocalypse of the promised future. But now if, as we have seen, Barth’s concept of the self-revelation of God was shaped precisely by this transcendental eschatology, must there not then come a corresponding revision in the understanding of revelation? Can the impression then be allowed to stand that ‘self-revelation of God’ means the ‘pure presence of God’, an ‘eternal presence of God in time’, a ‘present without any future’? Can it then be said that the story of Easter ‘does not speak eschatologically’? If that were so, then the event of the resurrection of Christ would in itself already be the eschatological fulfilment, and would not point beyond itself to something still outstanding that is to be hoped for and awaited. To understand the revelation in Christ as self-revelation of God, is to take the question as to the future and the goal indicated by revelation, and answer it with a reflection on the origin of revelation, on God himself. With this reflection, however, it becomes almost impossible to see the revelation of the risen Lord as the ground for still speaking of an outstanding future of Jesus Christ. If the idea of self-revelation is not to change tacitly into an expression for the God of Parmenides, then it must have an open eye for the statements of promise in the third article of the Creed. Yet this must not happen in such a way that the future redemption which is promised in the revelation of Christ would become only a supplement, only a noetic unveiling of the reconciliation effected in Christ, but in such a way that it gives promise of the real goal and true intention of that reconciliation, and therefore of its future as really outstanding, not yet attained and not yet realized. Then the word of God—Deus dixit—would not be the naked self-proof of the eternal present, but a promise which as such discloses and guarantees an outstanding future. Then the result of this revelation in promise would be a new perception of history’s openness towards the future. Not all ages would have an equally immediate relation to God and an equal value in the light of eternity, but they would be perceived to be in a process determined by the promised eschaton. If the revelation of God in the resurrection of Christ contains within itself an eschatological differentiation, then it opens the way for history in the category of expectation and remembrance, of assurance and imperilment, of promise and repentance.
The fact that Rudolf Bultmann is by far the more faithful pupil of W. Herrmann has been noted by many, both in positive and in negative terms. Some hold that Bultmann’s existentialistic approach merely lifts Herrmann’s principles into the sphere of ontological conceptuality, while others find on the contrary already in Herrmann a conquest of Kantian idealism and an anticipation of the dimensions of modern existentialistic questions and insights. It is Bultmann’s inheritance from Herrmann that excites also Barth’s criticism. And in actual fact Herrmann’s passionate sense of ‘self’ does enter into Bultmann’s emphasis on the ‘self-understanding’, while the problem of personal, individual appropriation of the faith, which Herrmann felt so keenly, appears again in the problem of understanding. The transition from the Kantianism of the early Herrmann to the existentialist theology of Bultmann was doubtless made possible by the influence of vitalist philosophy on the later Herrmann.
Of Herrmann’s basic principles, the most outstanding in the theology of Bultmann is the exclusive relation to existence, or self, of all statements about God and his action. To be sure, in his essay of 1924 on ‘Die liberale Theologie und die jüngste theologische Bewegung’, in which he expresses his agreement with dialectical theology, he says: ‘The object of theology is God, and the objection to liberal theology is, that it treated not of God but of man. God means the radical negation and cancellation of man.’ Nevertheless this very essay ends with the programmatic statement: ‘The object of theology is certainly God, and theology speaks of God by speaking of man as he is confronted by God, that is, in the light of faith.’ Thus God can be spoken of only in connection with our own existence. If faith is a matter of comprehending our own existence, then that means at the same time comprehending God, and vice versa. ‘If we would speak of God, then manifestly we must speak of ourselves.’
The relation which all statements about God and his action bear to existence, or self, is exclusive. This, too, is inherited from Herrmann. It involves the rejection of all objective statements about God which are not existentially verifiable but are derived from the realms of mythology and world-picture without regard to our own existence—indeed, it is only arrived at in the light of the antithesis that has continually to be stated anew between Weltanschauung and self-understanding, between objectified statements and the non-objectifiability of God and of existence. Here, ever since his review of Barth’s Römerbrief in 1922, lies the main emphasis in his criticism of Barth’s theological development.
Let us consider first of all Bultmann’s thesis of the unobservable, hidden correlation of God and the ‘self’ of man. For him, as for Herrmann, God and the ‘self’ of man stand in un-severed relation to each other. Man by his creation is appointed to be himself. Hence questionableness is the structure of human existence. Man is by nature in quest of himself. In and with the question raised by his existence there arises the question of God. ‘We cannot speak about our existence when we cannot speak about God; and we cannot speak about God when we cannot speak about our existence. We could only do the one along with the other.… If it is asked how it can be possible to speak of God, then the answer must be: only in speaking of us.’ Hence man attains to himself only in God, and only where he attains to himself does he attain to God. To both—God and the human self, or rather each peculiar existence—belongs the characteristic of non-objectifiability. The closed system of cause and effect in the discernible, explicable, objectively demonstrable world of things and of history is therefore set aside (a) when I speak of God’s action, and (b) when I speak of myself. ‘In faith the closed weft presented or produced by objective observation is transcended … when it (faith) speaks of the activity of God. In the last resort it is already transcended when I speak of myself.’ The statements of scripture arise out of existence and are addressed to existence. They have not to justify themselves at the forum of an objectifying science of nature and history, since the latter does not even set eyes on the non-objectifiable existence of man. That determines the programme of existentialist interpretation and of demythologizing. This interpretation is governed by the question of God that is given with the questionableness of existence, and it is accordingly directed towards an understanding that has neither mythical nor scientific objectivity but is in each several instance individual appropriation in the spontaneity of that subjectivity which is non-objectifiable because transcendental.
Whereas Barth broke away from Herrmann by separating, as we have seen, the non-objectifiable subjectivity of God in the act of the Deus dixit from the subjectivity of man, that is, God’s ‘self’ from ‘man’s self’, Bultmann remains under the spell of the hidden correlation of God and self. Hence for him the self-revelation of God finds its measure and development not in a doctrine of the Trinity, but in place of that we find the disclosing of the authenticity or selfhood of man. It is true that God’s action, God’s revelation, God’s future are unprovable, yet that does not by any means imply that our statements are arbitrary, but all the statements in question find non-objectified verification, so to speak, in man’s coming to himself. The place of the proofs of God from nature and from history is taken, not by an unprovability of God that opens the door to arbitrariness, but by an existential proof of God, by speaking and thinking of God as the factor that is enquired after in the question raised by man’s existence. That is an advanced, deepened and reshaped form of the only proof of God left over by Kant—the moral proof of God supplied by the practical reason. God is—objectively—unprovable, and so likewise is his action and revelation. But he proves himself to the believing ‘self’. This is no proof of the existence of God, but a proof of God through existing authentically. It is true that in this interpretation the Christian hope leaves the future as God’s future ‘empty’ as far as mythological, prognosticative pictures of the future are concerned, and renounces all wishful thinking. Yet there is a very precise criterion for determining what God’s ‘future’ then is—namely, ‘the realization of human life’ which is the object of the question raised by the questionableness of human existence. ‘Eschatology has wholly lost its sense as goal of history, and is in fact understood as the goal of the individual human being.’ It is therefore just as impossible for Bultmann as for Kant that eschatology should provide a doctrine of the ‘last things’ in the world process, but the logos of the eschaton becomes the power of liberation from history, the power of the desecularization of existence in the sense of liberating us from understanding ourselves on the basis of the world and of works.
This proof of God from existence, in the framework of which theological questions are here asked and theological statements made, has a long previous history in dogmatic thought. Karl Jaspers points out that ‘existence and transcendence’ is the rendering in philosophical language of what the language of myth calls ‘soul and God’, and that in both languages it is defined as ‘not world’. This, like occasional quotations also in Bultmann, refers us back to Augustine. From Augustine via mediaeval mysticism and the Reformation to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and on to Herrmann, this proof of God has left its mark on the Western consciousness.
The identification of the hiddenness of God and of man’s self, or his soul (not as a substance in Aristotle’s sense, but as subject) presupposes already in Augustine that for himself man is immediately given and that he can therefore be immediately certain of himself, whereas the world, the things of nature and the events of history are accessible to him only through the mediation of the senses. ‘Of all the things that we can perceive, know and love, none is so certain to us as that we exist. Here we are not troubled by the deception of a mere semblance of the truth. For we grasp this truth not as we grasp things external to us, by means of any of our bodily senses; but without the intrusion of any illusory phantasies I am completely certain that I exist, that I know and that I love.’ Because of this immediacy, this proof of God is superior to the others known to Augustine, such as the cosmological and aesthetic: ‘Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi, in interiore homine habitat Veritas.’ This way to knowledge of God from knowledge of self found a following in the Augustinian mysticism of the Middle Ages, especially in Bernard of Clairvaux. It is against the background of the Augustine renaissance in the Reformers that we have to understand Calvin when he says: ‘All our wisdom, so far as it really deserves to be called wisdom and is true and dependable, ultimately embraces two things: the knowledge of God and our self-knowledge. These two, however, are interconnected in manifold ways, and therefore it is not at all such a simple matter to say which comes first and produces the other as its result.’ Calvin worked out a thoroughly dialectic relation between the two: without knowledge of God no self-knowledge, without self-knowledge no knowledge of God. It is likewise under the bane of the Augustinian tradition that Luther roundly asserts: Cognitio Dei et hominis est sapientia divina et proprie theologica. Et ita cognitio Dei et hominis, ut referatur tandem ad deum justificantem et hominem peccatorem, ut proprie sit subjectum Theologiae homo reus et perditus et deus justificans vel salvator. quicquid extra istud argumentum vel subjectum quaeritur, hoc plane est error et vanitas in Theologia (‘The knowledge of God and man is wisdom that is divine and properly speaking theological. And the knowledge of God and man is such that it refers ultimately to the God who justifies and the man who is a sinner, so that the proper subject of theology is man as condemned and lost and God as Justifier or Saviour. Any question which lies outside this argument or subject is plainly idle and wrong in theology.’) Whereas in Augustinian mysticism, however, the correlation of knowledge of God and self-knowledge could be taken as immediate and unmediated, for the Reformers, and still for Pascal, both are mediated by the knowledge of Christ: the crucified Christ is the mirror of God and the mirror of ourself. Nevertheless in the Reformers, too, as already in Augustine, this concentration of theology upon the knowledge of God and of self leaves no room over for any consideration of God’s world. On the contrary, this threatens to be banished from theology. Descartes then drops all proofs of God from the world. Semper existimavi duas quaestiones, de Deo et de Anima, praecipuas esse ex iis quae Philosophiae potius quam Theologiae ope sunt demonstrandae (‘I have always considered two questions—that of God and that of the soul—to be chief among those that require to be proved by means of philosophy rather than theology’). Descartes’ third Meditation on the immediate self-consciousness and the consciousness of God therein given takes up—via the French Augustine renaissance of the seventeenth century—the reflection of Augustine quoted above. Since, however, the proof of God is found in the immediate self-consciousness and the reflecting subject knows himself and God ‘per eandem facultatem’ and ‘simul’, the field of res extensae is left to a calculability that is void of God and oblivious of being. Ever since the scientific and historical Enlightenment, what theology says, thinks and proclaims about the action of God has been directed ever more strongly to that subjectivity of man which was given a free rein precisely by the secularization of the world effected by the Enlightenment. Much as in the passages cited from Bultmann, we find also in G. Ebeling: ‘Thus the fact of man’s identity being open to question opens also the question of God.’ This proof of God from existence, in the form of the question of God that arises from the question ability of human existence, involves the same presupposition as the proofs of God from the world or from history. It presupposes an antecedently given relation to God of the soul, the self or existence, even if this relation cannot be objectively proved but only subjectively experienced in the experience of certainty. In the restless heart that is due to his creation, man is engaged in the quest for God, whether he knows it or not.
The peculiar radicality of this proof of God from existence is due to the form now assumed by subjectivity as a product of reflective philosophy. Inasmuch as this subjectivity understands itself as the incomprehensible immediacy of our existing, it is attained by distinguishing itself from the non-self, from the world of observable, calculable and disposable things and of our own objectifications. If he is to be able to be a person in the proper sense, man must distinguish himself radically from his world. All statements on the relation of the person to God become definable only by means of the opposite, relation to the world. Man then continually distinguishes between his being part of the world and his being his own self, and so makes the world a secularized world and his self the pure receiving of his person from God. This process of abstracting our own individual subjectivity from all relationships to the world in endless reflection is a modern phenomenon. The proof of God from existence was not found in this antithesis either in Augustine or in the Reformers. On the contrary, they knew of God’s working—albeit a hidden working—in the world, in nature and in history, and expounded it in the doctrine of created orders. The concept of science which Herrmann and Bultmann have taken over from Kantianism, however, no longer allows of this. For them, scientific knowledge is thought to be of an objectifying kind and its categories are designed for a ‘closed system of cause and effect’ and a world-order regulated by set laws, both in natural and in historical science. For the experience we have of reality under these categories, God and his action remain hidden in principle. Hence the result is, as for Kierkegaard, the alliance of a theoretic atheism and a believing heart. Theological importance can therefore attach only to these scientific efforts as such—and that, too, for the existing subject of the act of knowing. If this scientific way of thinking about reality and of dealing with it has its ground in man’s practical turn of mind and his will to power, in his desire to command, to survey, to calculate, to assert himself and make himself secure, then from the theological point of view that comes near to man’s attaining to self-assurance from his works. This means that for the man who is confronted by the message of grace, the dimension ‘world’ is now relevant only within the framework of the question of justification—in the question whether he seeks to understand himself ‘from the world’ as the disposable realm of his works, or ‘from God’ the Indisposable. For the subject in search of himself, ‘world’ and ‘God’ thereby become radical alternatives. Man comes to stand ‘between God and the world’ (Gogarten). There is no need to mention that this view of ‘God’ and ‘world’ as alternatives has a previous history in gnosticism and in mysticism. More important is the fact that this kind of theological understanding of ‘world’ forces both man’s scientific and his practical dealings with reality into a legalism which does not accord with this reality. Does the objective knowledge of the world and of history necessarily fall, in the view of theology, under ‘the law’? Is any self-understanding of man conceivable at all which is not determined by his relation to the world, to history, to society? Can human life have subsistence and duration without outgoing and objectification, and without this does it not evaporate into nothingness in endless reflection? It is the task of theology to expound the knowledge of God in a correlation between understanding of the world and self-understanding.
The categorical framework of a transcendental subjectivity also dominates Bultmann’s understanding of revelation. The revelation of God is accordingly a matter of man’s coming to himself, truly understanding himself. ‘Revelation means that opening up of what is hidden which is absolutely necessary and decisive for man if he is to achieve “salvation” or authenticity.’ This presupposes for one thing that man cannot of himself attain to his authenticity, but must seek for revelation, but secondly that he is necessarily destined to come to his authenticity. If his authenticity is disclosed to him by revelation, then the divinity of God discloses itself to him therein. Christian proclamation and Christian faith answer this anterior question of man about himself—the question which in virtue of his questionable nature he himself is—not by what they say and what they mediate, but by what they are. ‘Revelation does not mediate any speculative knowledge, but it addresses us. The fact that in it man learns to understand himself, means that he learns to understand each several “now” of his life, each several moment, as one qualified by the proclamation. For to be in the moment is his authentic being.’ Revelation in this sense is the event of preaching and faith. Revelation is the coming about of the ἀκοὴ τῆς πίστεως. ‘The preaching is itself revelation and does not merely speak about it.’ ‘It is only in faith that the object of faith is disclosed; therefore, faith itself belongs to revelation.’ Not in what the word of proclamation says or in what it points to, but in the fact that it ‘happens’, addressing, accosting, appealing, lies the event of revelation. ‘What, then, is revealed? Nothing at all, so far as the quest for revelation is a quest for doctrines.… But everything, so far as man has his eyes opened regarding himself and can understand himself again.’ Thus here the event of the proclamation that addresses us, and of the decision of faith that understands and appropriates it, is itself revelation. Since the governing question of revelation is constituted by the questionableness of human existence itself, the revelation discloses a self-understanding in authenticity, certainty and identity with oneself. The active event of revelation is itself the presence of the eschaton, for ‘to be in the moment’ of proclamation and faith is the ‘authentic being’ of man. Authentic being, however, means the restoring of man’s original being in the sense of creatureliness and the attaining of finality in the sense of eschatology. Both are fulfilled in the historicality determined by word and faith. In the ‘moment’ of revelation, creation and redemption coincide. What is revealed is identical with the event, the fact that revelation takes place.
Here two questions arise:
1. When the questionableness of human existence is exclusively made the governing question of revelation and salvation, and this question is narrowed down to the alternative of understanding oneself either from the disposable ‘world’ or the indisposable ‘God’, then the self-evidence of the ‘self-understanding’ is manifestly not called in question, neither hermeneutically in relation to the received texts nor theologically. Yet why should the anterior understanding which causes man to ask for ‘revelation’ be only an ‘unknowing knowledge’ ‘about himself’ and ‘not a knowledge of the world’? Why is the word that has all along been the light of men ‘naturally … not a cosmological or theological theory but … an understanding of oneself through acknowledging the Creator’? Why does revelation not supply a ‘Weltanschauung’, but a new ‘self-understanding’? What Bultmann presupposes in this context as a ‘natural’ and self-evident alternative, is not in the least ‘natural’, but is an exact description of a definite Weltanschauung, a definite view of history and a definite analysis of time, according to which man has become questionable to himself in his social, corporeal and historic relations to the world and attains his selfhood by differentiation from the external world and reflection upon his objectifications. Basically, however, ‘Weltanschauung’ and ‘self-understanding’ lie on the same plane. The one presupposes the other and is inseparably bound up with it. Only in his outgoing towards the world does man experience himself. Without objectification no experience of oneself is possible. Always man’s self-understanding is socially, materially and historically mediated. An immediate self-consciousness and a non-dialectical identity with himself is not possible to man—that is shown precisely by the dialectical antithesis of world and self in Bultmann.
2. The theological question arises whether it is really true that in the event of revelation in proclamation and faith man already comes ‘to himself’ in that authenticity which is at once both original and final. In that case faith would itself be the practical end of history and the believer would himself already be perfected. There would be nothing more that still awaits him, and nothing more towards which he is on his way in the world in the body and in history. God’s ‘futurity’ would be ‘constant’ and man’s openness in his ‘wayfaring’ would likewise be ‘constant’ and ‘never-ending’. This, however, is just what would cause believing existence, understood in an ‘eschatological’ sense of this sort, to turn into a new form of the ‘epiphany of the eternal present’. If Jesus with his word has already reached his ‘goal’ in faith itself, then it is hardly conceivable that faith is directed towards promissio and that faith has itself a goal (1 Peter 1:9) to which it is on the way, that ‘it doth not yet appear what we shall be’ (1 John 3:2), and that faith is thus out for something which is promised to it but which is not yet fulfilled. If it is precisely believers who wait for the redemption of the body, on the ground of the eschatologically understood ‘earnest of the Spirit’ who is the Spirit of the raising of the dead, then in so doing they make it known that they have not yet attained to identity with themselves, but that in hope and confidence they are living to that end and here defy the reality of death. It is precisely in the context of the eschatological distinction of ‘not yet’, in which faith stretches out towards the future, that it becomes possible to perceive a world that is not identical with ‘world’ in the antithetical sense in which the doctrine of justification uses the term to denote the epitome of corruption, law and death. If faith awaits the ‘redemption of the body’, and a bodily resurrection from the dead, and the annihilation of death, then it begins to see itself in a profound bodily solidarity with the ‘earnest expectation of the creature’ (Rom. 8:19ff.), both in its subjection to vanity and in the universal hope. Then it does not regard the world from the standpoint of the ‘law’. It sees it not merely as ‘world’ in the sense of being unable to understand itself from the world, but perceives it in the eschatological perspective of promise. The world itself is subjected along with it to vanity, in hope. The future which the promise of the God of the resurrection opens to faith is given to the creature along with it and to it along with the creature. The creature itself is a ‘wayfarer’, and the homo viator is engaged along with reality in a history that is open towards the future. Thus he does not find himself ‘in the air’, ‘between God and the world’, but he finds himself along with the world in that process to which the way is opened by the eschatological promise of Christ. It is not possible to speak of believing existence in hope and in radical openness, and at the same time consider the ‘world’ to be a mechanism or self-contained system of cause and effect in objective antithesis to man. Hope then fades away to the hope of the solitary soul in the prison of a petrified world, and becomes the expression of a gnostic longing for redemption. Talk of the openness of man is bereft of its ground, if the world itself is not open at all but is a closed shell. Without a cosmic eschatology there can be no assertion of an eschatological existence of man. Christian eschatology therefore cannot reconcile itself with the Kantian concepts of science and of reality. The very mode of our experience of the world is not adiaphorous. On the contrary, world-picture and faith are inseparable—precisely because faith cannot suffer the world to become a picture of God, nor a picture of man.
The intention behind the old idea of understanding God’s revelation as ‘progressive revelation’ was to construe revelation in historic terms and see the history of the world as revelation. Ideas of this kind go back to late federal theology (J. Cocceius) and the early pietistic theology of history, the so-called ‘prophetic’ and ‘economic’ theology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In contrast to Orthodoxy’s supranaturalistic and doctrinaire view of revelation, the Bible was here read as a history book, as the divine commentary upon the divine acts in world history. This new historic understanding of revelation had its ground in the rebirth of eschatological millenarianism in the post-reformation age. It was the start of a new, eschatological way of thinking, which called to life the feeling for history. The revelation in Christ was accordingly seen in the light of history as a transitional stage in a more far-reaching ‘kingdom of God’ process, and taken as an ultimate datum for the future, yet also one that points beyond itself. The revelation of God is consequently not an ‘eternal moment’, and the eschaton that comes to light in it is not a ‘futurum aeternum’, but the revelation in Christ is then the last, decisive element in the history of a kingdom whose pre-history begins in the Fall and indeed already in the Creation—whether with the proto-gospel of Gen. 3:15 or with the promise of the divine image in Gen. 1:28—and whose final history extends historically and noetically beyond the revelation in Christ. The revelation in Christ is thus placed under the head of a history of revelation, whose progressiveness is expressed in the idea of the developing of salvation stage by stage according to a previously fixed plan of salvation. This theology of the ‘plan’ of saving history has many striking parallels with the scientific deism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is in every sense a religious product of the Enlightenment. For that reason it can find expression in terms both of pietism and of rationalism, both of history of salvation and of history of progress. Yet its real appeal lies not so much in the enlightened explanation of the divine saving plan of history, but rather in taking the testimonies of scripture, which point historically towards each other and also beyond themselves, and using them to turn history into a ‘system of hope’ (J. A. Bengel) by which to answer the question of the future and goal which the Christian revelation contains for the nations, for our bodily existence, for nature and for Israel. This theology of a progressive revelation of God in the history of salvation—conceived as esoteric knowledge on the part of those in initiated circles—is ‘economic’ to the extent that it brings to light the ‘economies’, or saving dispensations, of God in the past and thus turns past history into comprehended history, while on the other hand it draws conclusions for God’s future action from his ways in the past. It is ‘prophetic’ in the ultimate sense, since it seeks to take prophecies and events in the past which point beyond the present, and use them as a means of discovering and portraying the future.
Its truth surely lies in the mere fact of its taking the trouble to enquire at all into the inward tendency and eschatological outlook which the divine revelation in history has towards the future. Its mistake, however, is to be seen in the fact that it sought to discover the eschatological progressiveness of salvation history not from the cross and the resurrection, but from other ‘signs of the times’—from an apocalyptic view of the corruption of the Church and the decay of the world, or from an optimistic view of the progress of culture and knowledge—so that revelation became a predicate of history, and ‘history’ was turned deistically into a substitute for God.
What made this theology of salvation history possible was that resurgence of apocalyptic thought and hope which both in the theological and in the secular realm accompanied the birth of the ‘modern age’. Yet it is an apocalyptic which is evolved from the standpoint of cosmology and world history and based on a historico-theological proof of God from history. It did not pass through the fires of Kantian criticism, nor did it—even in its nineteenth-century representatives—ever submit itself to that criticism, while for its own part it was hardly ever critical of that criticism either. Where it appears in the theology of salvation history in nineteenth-century romanticism, it retains this uncritical character throughout. That means, however, that it never really entered into the spirit of the modern age but assumed the remoteness of esoteric church teaching. Yet that is not to dismiss the truth contained in this kind of theological thinking. Its underlying polemic against an abstract materialism and an unhistoric historicism must be noted, even if that polemic failed on the whole to succeed.
In the pietism of Württemberg, history was understood by J. A. Bengel and F. Ötinger as a living ‘organism’. Ötinger’s Theologia ex idea vitae deducta (1765) introduced the concept of life into theology and attempted by this means to make room for thinking of a comprehensive kind. This concept of life and of organism was not so much naturalistic, but rather had an eschatological orientation towards the awaited break-through of the glorious heavenly life in the resurrection. Its polemic was directed against the mechanistic world picture of the natural science of the Enlightenment, and against the idealistic subjectivism which went along with it. History, it maintained, should not be regarded as a collection of facts existing outside of man, but should be understood as a ‘stream of life’ which ‘organically’ surrounds man. Although the terms employed are derived from the life of nature and appear little suited for the comprehending of history, yet the criticism they express of Lamettrie’s L’homme machine and of the unhistoric scientific materialism of the Enlightenment of Western Europe is noteworthy. The idea of the ‘world machine’ and of the ‘forest’ that has turned to ‘firewood’ is assailed by the salvation history school’s theology of life. The new central concepts ‘history’ and ‘life’ thereby acquire significance for the overcoming of the modern antithesis of ‘subjectivity and objectification’. They were also taken over by Hegel in this sense, presumably from the Württemberg tradition. At all events it is in harmony with the intentions of Ötinger when Karl Marx in his critique of abstract scientific materialism and of Ludwig Feuerbach says: ‘As soon as we have this active life process before us, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts, as in the still abstract thought even of the empiricists, or a series of imagined actions on the part of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.’ Both abstractions, subjectivity and objectification, acquire reality and lose their abstract, non-historic character in the dialectical process. The only question is, what constitutes this process, what is the subject of it, and what is its goal.
The idea of salvation history has furthermore an emphatically anti-historical tenor. Auberlen declared: ‘The task of theology today consists in overcoming rationalistic unhistorical historicism … through the knowledge of sacred history.’ The only noteworthy thing about this statement is the assertion that historicism is ‘unhistorical’. The overcoming of it by means of a manifestly non-rational knowledge of ‘sacred history’ remains an illusion unless and until a new understanding of ratio can be acquired. The theology of salvation history was never itself able to bring about a critical change in the epistemological principles of historical science, and consequently always appears in the age of critical historical research to be an anachronistic means of glossing over the crisis in which the theology of revelation finds itself in the modern age. The ‘disenchanting’ of history by historical science certainly cannot be undone by weaving a romantic, metahistorical, believing spell into history again. Only when critical historical science discovers its own historicality and learns to take it as a presupposition and a methodological principle, is there any chance of its realizing the possibility of attaining a ‘historic’ understanding of history and getting beyond an ‘unhistorical historicism’. The traditional theology of salvation history bears much the same relationship to historical criticism as does Goethe’s theory of colour to Newton’s analysis of light. It has aesthetic and poetic categories of its own, but none by which the reality of history today could be grasped and altered.
The real concern of the theology of salvation history, however, lay not so much in the metahistorical grasp of ‘sacred history’, but was rather to show that revelation has a face towards world history and eschatology. This purpose underlies the concept of ‘progressive revelation’.
Within the confines of a transcendental eschatology, revelation, as we have seen, becomes indifferent towards the ages of history. All ages are given an equally immediate relation to eternity, and history becomes the epitome of transience. R. Rothe rightly observes in his celebrated essay on revelation: ‘It (scripture) shows us a revelation of a totally different kind. It describes it above all as a series—and that, too, a constantly self-coherent series—of wondrous facts of history and dispensations in history which then form the starting point for instances of supernatural prophetic illumination that have a definite pragmatical connection with them and assume manifold forms, as visions and as inward experiences of being addressed by the Spirit of God, not so much in order to communicate new knowledge of religious truth as to give advance intimation of future events in history.’ Both forms of revelation, that of ‘outward manifestation’ and that of ‘inward inspiration’—a distinction which is made again and again between ‘revelation in act’ and ‘revelation in word’—are historically conditioned, from which it follows that the divine revelation takes place gradually through the dialectic of word and event in a succession of happenings which are foretold and come to pass, and that it presses towards an end in which it is itself fulfilled. ‘The advancing development of the kingdom of the Redeemer is at the same time also a continually advancing revelation of the absolute truth and perfection of the same.’ Thus in R. Rothe, and then with modifications also in Biedermann and E. Troeltsch, God’s revelation is certainly understood as self-revelation, yet is linked with the idea which the concept of salvation history provides of an eschatological and progressive, dialectically advancing self-realization of the Revealer. That means, however, that present history, the history of the modern age in its cultural, scientific and technical progress, must be represented as an element in the process of the self-realizing revelation of God and his kingdom. When, therefore, an outmoded and antiquated Christianity raised the apologetic question of its own present relevance, the theology of progressive revelation characteristic of cultural Protestantism had to answer by showing that the modern age which was superseding traditional Christianity was secretly Christian or had a secret part in the history of the kingdom. ‘Why is the Church opposed to cultural development?’ asked R. Rothe, and answered: ‘Oh, I blush to set it down: because it fears for belief in Christ. That is for me not faith, but faint-heartedness. But that is precisely what comes of disbelief in the real, effective world-dominion of the Saviour.’ In E. Troeltsch this question takes the form: ‘Are we still to be seen in continuity with Christianity, or are we growing towards a religious future which is no longer Christian?’ His answer was the idea of a progressive revelation which in every age anew brings the spirit of the age into synthesis with the traditional Christian message. Similar questions and answers played an active part in the circles around the Blumhardts and among the ‘religious socialists’.
Although the theology of progressive revelation never succeeded, in Rosenstock-Huessy’s phrase, in ‘overcoming modernity’, yet it does contain elements that are not to be dismissed simply by the fact that a transcendental eschatology makes all ages of history indifferent. Although the idea of salvation history is philosophically anachronistic and theologically deistic, yet it does preserve the question of the eschatological future outlook which the Christian revelation holds for a world involved in history. That is to say, all the themes of the eschatology of salvation history—such as the mission to the nations, the discussion of the future of Israel, the future of world history, of creation and of the body—are the proper themes of Christian eschatology as such, only they cannot be conceived in the traditional terms of salvation history. The decisive question is, whether ‘revelation’ is the illuminating interpretation of an existing, obscure life process in history, or whether revelation itself originates drives and directs the process of history; whether consequently, as Barth has asked, revelation is a predicate of history, or whether history has to be understood as a predicate of the eschatological revelation and to be experienced, expected and obediently willed as such.
Another attempt to free theological consideration of the ‘self-revelation’ of God from the fetters of the reflective philosophy of transcendental subjectivity—an attempt, moreover, which in many respects leaves the discussion still open—is found in the programmatic volume Offenbarung als Geschichte (1961) by W. Pannenberg, R. Rendtorff, U. Wilckens and T. Rendtorff.
Since Kant’s critique and the concept of science that was based on it, the impression had arisen that there can be no proof of God and of his action in history, and no objective demonstration of revelation, and this had compelled theology to speak of revelation only in the context and framework of transcendental subjectivity. That, however, is not by any means to say that theology had at last settled down to its own business, but rather that it had entered into a negative alliance with a particular, modern mode of experiencing the world. If this spell is to be broken and an alternative to this kind of theology of revelation is to be found, then that must of necessity be bound up with an alternative to the modern, post-Kantian concept of science, to the critical concept of reason, and to the historicism of a critical historical treatment of reality. An alternative to faith’s theology of revelation must then also bring criticism to bear on that critique of knowledge which Kant set up ‘in order to find a place for faith’. It must raise the question of God no longer in an exclusive sense on the ground of the questionableness of man’s subjectivity, but in an inclusive sense on the ground of the questionableness of reality as a whole, and it is in this comprehensive context that it must speak of God’s revelation and action.
Offenbarung als Geschichte therefore sets out not from the proof of God from existence, or from showing that the question of God arises from the questionableness of existence. Rather, it starts from the proof of God from the cosmos, or by showing that the question of God arises from consideration of the question of reality as a whole. The place of the ‘kerygma theology’, and of the idea of an immediate self-revelation of God in the appeal of the word, is therefore taken by the recognition of an ‘indirect self-revelation of God in the mirror of his action in history’. ‘The facts as acts of God shed a reflected light on God himself, tell us indirectly something about God himself.’ Since, however, each individual event, taken as an act of God, only partially illumines the nature of God, revelation in the sense of the full self-revelation of God in his glory can be possible only where the whole of history is understood as revelation. ‘History as a whole is thus revelation of God. Since it is not yet finished, it is only in the light of its end that it is recognizable as revelation.’ Hence the full self-revelation of God takes place ‘not at the beginning but at the end of the revealing history’. The apocalyptic writers of late Judaism had extraordinary visions in which they foresaw such an end of history in the general resurrection of the dead. In the (risen) ‘destiny’ of Jesus of Nazareth the end of history has accordingly been forestalled. For in his resurrection there has already happened to him what still awaits all men. If his resurrection is the ‘forestalling’, the anticipation, the prolepsis of the universal end, then it follows that in his destiny God himself is indirectly revealed as the God of all men.
This theology of universal history obviously intends in the first instance to extend and supersede the Greek cosmic theology. The place of the cosmological proof of God, which argued from ‘reality as cosmos’ to the one divine arche and so provided proof of a cosmological monotheism, is taken by a theology of history which argues back in the same way from the unity of ‘reality as history’ to the one God of history. The epistemological method remains the same, only in place of the self-contained cosmos whose eternally recurring sameness makes it a theophany in its symmetry and harmony, we have an open-ended cosmos with a teleological trend towards the future. ‘History’ thus becomes the new summary term for ‘reality in its totality’. In place of the metaphysical point in which the unity of the cosmos culminates, we have the eschatological point in which history finds its unity and its goal. Just as in the light of that culminating metaphysical unity the cosmos could be recognized as indirect revelation of God, so now in the light of the end of history, history can be recognized as indirect revelation of God. The retention of the retroflexive argument in the knowledge of God—‘in the mirror of his acts in history’—has the result that knowledge of God becomes possible in principle only post festum and a posteriori, in looking back upon completed facts in history and on prophecies that have come true in it. That, however, would be knowing God with the eyes of ‘Minerva’s owl’, which according to Hegel begins its flight only ‘when a form of life has grown old and reached perfection’. The place of the kerygma theology, which perceived God in the event of being addressed by the word, would then be taken by a theology of history, which hears God in the ‘language of the facts’. Just as in Greek cosmic theology the eternal being of God is indirectly manifest in that which is, and can be inferred from it, so here God’s being would be recognized in the has-beens of history. Now of course the fact that the ‘end of history’ is not yet here, but has only been forestalled in the destiny of Jesus, also makes the recognition of God in history into a knowledge that is always only of proleptic, anticipatory character. Yet the basic Old Testament insight that ‘history is that which happens between promise and fulfilment’—the insight from which Pannenberg and Rendtorff set out—is ultimately abandoned in favour of an eschatology which is expressed in terms of universal history and which proves itself by reference to ‘reality as a whole’ in an effort to improve on Greek cosmic theology. This eschatology acquires its eschatological character only from the fact that reality cannot yet be contemplated as a whole because it has not yet come to an end. With this, however, the Old Testament God of promise threatens to become a θεὸς ἐπιφανής, whose epiphany will be represented by the totality of reality in its completed form. The world will one day be theophany, indirect self-revelation of God in toto. Because it is not yet so, reality is open-ended towards the future and all knowledge of God and the world has an eschatologically qualified ‘provisional’ character. This, however, would mean that the thought structures of Greek cosmic theology remain in principle, and are simply given an eschatological application. The retention of the retroflexive method thereby leads to a view of ‘historic fact’ which, with its implied concept of being, of ‘mirror’ and ‘image’, appears to resist any combination with faith and hope and even with ‘history’. It remains unclear whether the place of the theophany in nature is taken merely by a theophany in history regarded as open-ended nature, or whether what is meant is the fundamentally different condition on which it becomes possible to perceive reality as history, namely, from the standpoint of promise. This theology of history as opposed to the theology of the word remains subject to Kant’s critique of theological metaphysics, as long as it itself fails to undertake critical reflection on the conditions of the possibility of perceiving reality as history in the eschatological and theological sense. We are told that this ‘theology of history’ differs from the traditional theology of salvation history in that it seeks to be ‘historically verifiable in principle’. But that is just what cannot be maintained, unless and until the concept of the ‘historical’ is transformed and the theology of history becomes the very ground of its redefinition.
As long as this theology of history regards ‘God’ as the object that is in question when we enquire about the unity and wholeness of reality, then its starting point is obviously different from that of the question about God and his faithfulness to his promises in history—a question which first arises only in the context of promise and expectation, as in the Old Testament. This is certainly not to say that Pannenberg’s question as to an appropriate understanding of the world on the part of theology, or a proof of its statements about God by reference to the whole of reality, is any less relevant than the question as to an appropriate self-understanding or the proving of our statements about God by reference to human existence in Bultmann. On the contrary, the ‘theology of history’ is a necessary supplement to the ‘theology of existence’.
The conflict between a theology of revelation in terms of word and one in terms of history is irresolvable, unless and until these two end-products of abstraction from reflective philosophy are surmounted by a third view which is either comprehensive or open in character. This attempt is made in a second aspect of the development of ‘revelation as history’ in the concept of the ‘history of tradition’. When history is regarded as the history of tradition, then we have no longer an alternative to the kerygma theology, as in the expression ‘language of the facts’ (which was after all intended only polemically), but we have here an attempt to bring together again the separated elements, namely, ‘word’, word-event, interpretation, evaluation, etc., on the one hand, and ‘factum’, facts and coherent groups of facts on the other. The theology of history with its ‘language of the facts’ does not mean the bruta facta, which present themselves to positivistic historicism as the end-products of abstraction from tradition, but means the divine ‘language of the facts in that context of tradition and expectation in which the events in question take place’. In this sense ‘history is always also the history of tradition’. ‘History of tradition is in fact to be regarded as the profounder term for history as such.’ The events which reveal God must be taken in and with the context in tradition in which they took place and along with which alone they have their original significance. Thus when history is regarded as the history of tradition, the modern distinction between ‘factuality’ and ‘significance’ is set aside in a way analogous to that of G. Ebeling’s ‘theology of the word-event’. As in the latter case the events are asserted along with the word in which they were originally announced, so here the words and traditions are asserted along with the historic events. The decisive question, however, is how the Cartesian and Kantian distinction between reality and the perception of it is overcome. If our intention is to see real events in that original context in experience and tradition in which they found expression at the time, then we can set out either hermeneutically from the word-event or in terms of universal history from the particular event in the totality of historic reality. In both cases, however, we must stand the test of that historical criticism to which the traditions are, and must be, subjected by the modern consciousness. The fact that the past encounters us in the ‘language of tradition’ and is accessible only therein has never been disputed. The only question has been, whether this ‘language of the tradition’ is ‘correct’ as far as the reality accessible to historical criticism is concerned. The historical criticism of the Christian traditions has ever since the Enlightenment presupposed with increasing radicalness a crisis in the traditions, if not indeed a revolutionary break in them. Since this crisis and this criticism, ‘tradition’ is no longer ‘taken for granted’. The relationship to history as tradition has become one of reflection and has lost its immediacy. If, therefore, we would understand ‘history as tradition’, then we shall have to find a new concept of ‘tradition’, which cancels out historical criticism and its sense of the crisis in history, yet without negating or muzzling it. This problem is not solved simply by showing that in many and devious ways modern historic thinking derives by historic tradition from the historic thinking of the Bible, for of course the point is not so much the origin of the modern historical consciousness, but rather its future.
Particularly difficult from the theological standpoint is the thesis that the raising of Jesus from the dead is the historically demonstrable prolepsis, the anticipation and forestalling of the end of universal history, so that in it the totality of reality as history can be contemplated in a provisional way. The thesis that this event of the raising of Jesus must be ‘historically’ verifiable in principle, would require us first of all so to alter the concept of the historical that it would allow of God’s raising the dead and would make it possible to see in this raising of the dead the prophesied end of history. To call the raising of Jesus historically verifiable is to presuppose a concept of history which is dominated by the expectation of a general resurrection of the dead as the end and consummation of history. Resurrection and the concept of history then contain a vicious circle for the understanding.
The important question for theology, however, is whether such an apocalyptic view of history—and, moreover, one reduced to the expectation of a general resurrection of the dead—is adequate to embrace the Easter appearance of the risen Lord in the context of tradition and expectation in which it was perceived by the disciples. If it were solely the risen ‘destiny’ of Jesus that constituted the forestalling of the end of all history and the anticipation of the ‘destiny’ still awaiting all men, then the risen Jesus himself would have no further future. Nor would it be for Jesus himself that those who know him would wait, but only for the repetition of his destiny in themselves. The Church would be waiting for that which has already happened to Jesus to be repeated for itself, but not for the future of the risen Lord. Certain as it is that the Easter appearances of Jesus were experienced and proclaimed in the apocalyptic categories of the expectation of the general resurrection of the dead and as a beginning of the end of all history, it is nevertheless equally certain that the raising of Jesus was not merely conceived solely as the first instance of the final resurrection of the dead, but as the source of the risen life of all believers. It is not merely said that Jesus is the first to arise and that believers will attain like him to resurrection, but it is proclaimed that he is himself the resurrection and the life and that consequently believers find their future in him and not merely like him. Hence they wait for their future by waiting for his future. The horizon of apocalyptic expectation is not by any means wide enough to embrace the post-Easter apocalyptic of the Church. The place of apocalyptic self-preservation to the end is taken by the mission of the Church. That mission can be understood only when the risen Christ himself has still a future, a universal future for the nations. Only then does the Church’s approach to the nations in the apostolate have any historic meaning. The apocalyptic outlook which interprets the whole of reality in terms of universal history is secondary compared with this world-transforming outlook in terms of promise and missionary history.
Finally, from the theological standpoint it may be due to the one-track character of the apocalyptic of universal history that the theological significance of the cross of Jesus recedes in favour of his resurrection. Between the expectations of late Jewish apocalyptic and of Christian eschatology stands the cross of Jesus. Hence all Christian resurrection eschatology bears the mark of an eschatologia crucis. That is more than merely a break in the coherent historic tradition of apocalyptic expectations. The contradiction of the cross permeates also the whole existence, life and theological thinking of the Church in the world.
If the programme of ‘Revelation as History’ is concerned to construct on the basis of the resurrection hope theological concepts and approaches to reality which will put an end to the above-mentioned negative alliance with the spirit of the modern age, then it is completely in accord with the demand made by Barth and Bonhoeffer that the ‘lordship of Christ’ must be consistently testified and presented all the way to the very heart of secular reality. Whether the statement about ‘proving the divinity of the biblical God by reference to the totality of the momentary experience of reality’ is appropriate to this, remains the question, for that is a task which will end not so much in confirming or superseding as in conflict and divergence. The uncritical use of such terms as ‘historical’, ‘history’, ‘facts’, ‘tradition’, ‘reason’, etc., in a theological sense, appears to show that the methodical, practical and speculative atheism of the modern age is here circumvented rather than taken seriously. If this very atheism—as it has been most profoundly understood by Hegel and Nietzsche—derives from the nihilistic discovery made on the ‘speculative Good Friday’, that ‘God is dead’, then the only real way of vindicating theology in face of this reality, in face of this reason, and in face of a society thus constituted, will be in terms of a theology of resurrection—in fact, in terms of an eschatology of the resurrection in the sense of the future of the crucified Lord. Such a theology must accept the ‘cross of the present’ (Hegel), its godlessness and godforsakenness, and there give theoretical and practical proof of the ‘spirit of the resurrection’. Then, however, revelation would not manifest and verify itself as history of our present society, but would disclose to this society and this age for the very first time the eschatological process of history. The theologian is not concerned merely to supply a different interpretation of the world, of history and of human nature, but to transform them in expectation of a divine transformation.
It is ultimately always a result of the influence of Greek methods of thought and enquiry when the revelation of God which is witnessed in the biblical scriptures is understood as ‘epiphany of the eternal present’. That describes the God of Parmenides rather than the God of the exodus and the resurrection. The revelation of the risen Christ is not a form of this epiphany of the eternal present, but necessitates a view of revelation as apocalypse of the promised future of the truth. In the light of this future of the truth, manifest in the promise, man experiences reality as history in all its possibilities and dangers, and is broken of that fixed view of reality in which it becomes an image of the deity.
Christian theology speaks of ‘revelation’, when on the ground of the Easter appearances of the risen Lord it perceives and proclaims the identity of the risen one with the crucified one. Jesus is recognized in the Easter appearances as what he really was. That is the ground of faith’s ‘historical’ remembrance of the life and work, claims and sufferings of Jesus of Nazareth. But the messianic titles, in which this identity of Jesus in cross and resurrection is claimed and described, all anticipate at the same time the not yet apparent future of the risen Lord. This means that the Easter appearances and revelations of the risen Lord are manifestly understood as foretaste and promise of his still future glory and lordship. Jesus is recognized in the Easter appearances as what he really will be. The ‘vital point’ for a Christian view of revelation accordingly lies neither in ‘that which came to expression in the man Jesus’ (Ebeling) nor in the ‘destiny of Jesus’ (Pannenberg) but—combining both of these—in the fact that in all the qualitative difference of cross and resurrection Jesus is the same. This identity in infinite contradiction is theologically understood as an event of identification, an act of the faithfulness of God. It is this that forms the ground of the promise of the still outstanding future of Jesus Christ. It is this that is the ground of the hope which carries faith through the trials of the god-forsaken world and of death.
‘Revelation’ in this event has not the character of logos-determined illumination of the existing reality of man and the world, but has here constitutively and basically the character of promise and is therefore of an eschatological kind. ‘Promise’ is a fundamentally different thing from a ‘word-event’ which brings truth and harmony between man and the reality that concerns him. ‘Promise’ is in the first instance also a different thing from an eschatologically oriented view of reality as universal history. Promise announces the coming of a not yet existing reality from the future of the truth. Its relation to the existing and given reality is that of a specific inadaequatio rei et intellectus. On the other hand, it does not merely anticipate and clarify the realm of coming history and the realistic possibilities it contains. Rather, ‘the possible’, and therewith ‘the future’, arises entirely from God’s word of promise and therefore goes beyond what is possible and impossible in the realistic sense. It does not illuminate a future which is always somehow already inherent in reality. Rather, ‘future’ is that reality which fulfils and satisfies the promise because it completely corresponds to it and accords with it. It is only in that event which is spoken of as ‘new creation out of nothing’, as ‘resurrection of the dead’, as ‘kingdom’ and ‘righteousness’ of God, that the promise contained in the resurrection of Christ finds a reality which accords with it and completely corresponds to it. The revealing of the divinity of God therefore depends entirely on the real fulfilment of the promise, as vice versa the fulfilment of the promise has the ground of its possibility and of its reality in the faithfulness and the divinity of God. To that extent ‘promise’ does not in the first instance have the function of illuminating the existing reality of the world or of human nature, interpreting it, bringing out its truth and using a proper understanding of it to secure man’s agreement with it. Rather, it contradicts existing reality and discloses its own process concerning the future of Christ for man and the world. Revelation, recognized as promise and embraced in hope, thus sets an open stage for history, and fills it with missionary enterprise and the responsible exercise of hope, accepting the suffering that is involved in the contradiction of reality, and setting out towards the promised future.
This certainly does not mean that the need to attain to an appropriate understanding of existence and to find our bearings in universal history is rendered superfluous. Only both of these, the illumination of the historic character of human existence and the anticipatory illumination of contexts and prospects in terms of universal history, will have to be coordinated with the apostolic process of history which God’s revelation calls to life in promise. The God-revealing event of promise can find articulated expression only in the midst of, and by reference to, the questionableness of the world as a whole and of human nature itself, but it is neither exhausted therein nor identical therewith. It takes up both into the peculiar context of its own enquiry, in which context the knowledge of the truth presents itself in the form of a question that is open towards the fulfilment of the promise.
If it is true that the appearances of the risen Lord are to be taken as a foretaste of his own future, then they are to be understood in the context of the Old Testament history of promise, and not in analogy to an epiphany of the truth in the Greek sense. The witnesses of Easter do not recognize the risen Lord in a blaze of heavenly, supra-worldly eternity, but in the foretaste and dawn of his eschatological future for the world. They do not regard him as the one who has been ‘immortalized’, but as the one who ‘is to come’. They saw him not as what he is in timeless eternity, but as what he will be in his coming lordship. We can therefore say: the risen Lord encounters us as the living Lord, inasmuch as he is in motion, on the march towards his goal. ‘He is still future to himself.’ With the resurrection, his work is ‘not yet completed, not yet concluded’. These statements come from Barth’s later work and show plainly the direction which the revision of his eschatology of eternity must take. The appearances of the risen Lord were recognized as the promise and anticipation of a really outstanding future. Because in these appearances a process was manifestly perceptible, they provoked testimony and mission. The future of the risen Lord is accordingly here present in promise; it is accepted in a hope that is prepared to suffer, and it is grasped by the critical mind that reflects on men and things in hope.
But what does it mean to say that the risen Lord in his revelation is the promise of his own future? It would have to mean that Jesus reveals and identifies himself as the Christ both in identity with himself and in differentiation from himself. He reveals and identifies himself as the crucified one, and to that extent in identity with himself. He reveals himself as the Lord on the way to his coming lordship, and to that extent in differentiation from what he will be. The revelation of his future in his appearances is therefore a ‘hidden’ one. He is the hidden Lord and the hidden Saviour. Through hope the life of believers is hidden with him in God—yet in a hiddenness that is made for future unveiling, and aims at it, and presses towards it. The future of Jesus Christ is in this context the revelation and manifestation of him who has come. Faith is directed in hope and expectation towards the revelation of what it has already found hidden in Christ. And yet the future of the risen Lord, that which in his resurrection is promised, intended and held in prospect, involves not merely a noetic expectation. His future is not merely the unveiling of something that was hidden, but also the fulfilment of something that was promised. The revelation in the appearances of the risen Christ has therefore to be described not only as ‘hidden’, but also as ‘unfinished’, and has to be related to a reality which is not yet here. It is still outstanding, has not yet come about, has not yet appeared, but it is promised and guaranteed in his resurrection, and indeed is given along with his resurrection as a necessary consequence: the end of death, and a new creation in which amid the life and righteousness of all things God is all in all. Thus the future of the risen Lord involves also the expectation of a creative act. The word in which this comes to expression is therefore gospel and promise in one. If ‘revelation’ in the context of the Easter appearances does not refer to a completed, self-contained process or to the presence of eternity, then it must be understood as an open-ended revelation that points forwards and leads forwards. This, its eschatological openness, will certainly not be filled up, carried on and completed by the subsequent Church and its history. If it is towards his own future and promise that the revelation of the risen Lord is open, then its openness to the future surpasses all subsequent Church history and is absolutely superior to it. The remembrance of the promise that has been given—of the promise in its givenness (Er-gangenheit), not in its pastness (Ver-gangenheit)—bores like a thorn in the flesh of every present and opens it for the future. In this sense the revelation of the risen Lord does not become ‘historic’ as a result of the fact that history continues willy-nilly, but it stands as a sort of primum movens at the head of the process of history. It is in virtue of this revelation that the reality of man and his world becomes ‘historic’, and it is the hope set upon this revelation that makes all reality inadequate and as such transient and surpassable. It is the promissio inquieta that is the true source of Augustine’s cor inquietum. It is the promissio inquieta that will not suffer man’s experience of the world to become a self-contained cosmic image of the deity, but keeps our experience of the world open to history.
If revelation is promise in this sense, then it has to be related to the process which is brought about by missionary enterprise. The process of witness to the eschatological hope by those who in each succeeding present have to answer for their hope, the apostolate which involves the world of the nations in this process, and the exodus from the present of a self-contained existence into the promised future—these are the things that constitute the history which ‘corresponds’ to this kind of revelation, because it is called to life by this revelation. Awareness of history is awareness of mission, and the knowledge of history is a transformatory knowledge.
Now this revelation of God in the event of promise can always be expressed only in relation to, and critical comparison with, man’s experience of the world and of existence at any given moment. Here lies the justification for the views of revelation we have discussed, which see it in the context of the proof of God from existence or of the proof of God from the totality of reality. If God is not spoken of in relation to man’s experience of himself and his world, then theology withdraws into a ghetto and the reality with which man has to do is abandoned to godlessness. Since the days of the early Christian apologists, the promissio Dei of which the biblical scriptures speak has always been considered in the form of the Greek logos. Yet it should be noted that between the two extreme possibilities of ghetto and assimilation, the promissio Dei has always worked as a ferment of destruction of the Greek logos—namely, in such a way that the illuminating truth of the Greek logos has been given eschatological, and therewith historic, character.
In this process, theology can give polemical and liberating proof of its truth even today. Yet it is just when we perceive the revelation of God in the promise and are thereby led to ask what light this sheds on the humanity of man and the reality of the world, that we then find ourselves in the neighbourhood of the proofs of God and of ‘natural theology’.
Following an ancient definition, ‘natural theology’ is understood as a ‘theologia naturalis, generalis et immediata’, i.e. a knowledge of God which is not mediated but given along with reality, universally accessible and immediate. To this there belonged the knowledge that the world is God’s world, or that to ask about the origin or the totality of reality is to ask about God, and secondly, the knowledge of man’s peculiar standing in the cosmos, a general idea that to be man is to be subject to the claims of God’s law—in other words, the knowledge that the question raised in the questionableness of human existence is the question of God. Whatever the way in which these proofs of God, or indications of the question of God, were presented by Christian theology as universally accessible, they were always so presented as to provide pointers to, and suitable agreements with, the ‘supernatural, special and historically mediated’ knowledge of God. Whatever Western theology may have taken up and represented in this way as ‘natural theology’, it was never ‘natural’ and was neither ‘universally human’ nor ‘immediate’. On closer inspection, ‘natural theology’ always contained knowledge historically mediated from particular intellectual traditions—from the Stoa, from Plato and Aristotle, etc. The common sense which was appealed to always proves to be a common sense that has developed in history and bears a Western stamp. The ‘natural’ element in ‘natural theology’ was thus not at all something that comes ‘by nature’, but always came from history and was an adoption of what society regarded as natural, i.e. as axiomatic. The Aristotle who was held to be the father of natural theology is no longer by any means identical with the historical Aristotle, but was an Aristotelian heritage worked over by Christian theology. What was called ‘nature’ and ‘universal consciousness of God’ in a Christian sense had always already been determined by the content for which it was supposed to provide a general framework. Thus it is true that ‘natural theology’ is a presupposition of the theology of revelation—in the sense that revelation first posits, creates and fashions it in its specific form. That is not by any means to put an end to the business of natural theology. On the contrary, it is a necessary part of reflection upon nature and human existence in the light of revelation. It therefore continues to be a necessary part of theology as such, if the latter would give expression to the universal sweep of the revelation of God. But as a pre-sup-position of theology—a position already predetermined by theology—it belongs to the presentation of revelation’s universal, eschatological outlook of expectation. In this sense H. J. Iwand’s thesis is correct: ‘Natural theology is not that from which we come, but the light to which we are going. The lumen naturae is the reflection of the lumen gloriae.… The reform that is required of theology today consists in assigning revelation to this age, but natural theology to the age to come.’ In this sense ‘natural theology’—theology of existence and theology of history—is a halo, a reflection of the future light of God upon the inadequate material of present reality, a foretaste and advance intimation of the promised universal glory of God, who will prove himself to all and in all to be the Lord. What is called ‘natural theology’ is in actual truth theologia viatorum, an anticipation of the promised future in history as a result of obedient thinking. Hence it always remains historic, provisional, variable and open. If it means perceiving and reflecting upon the reality in which every man stands, but doing so on the basis of faith and hope, then for that reason it does not have the appeal that its statements are ‘self-evident’, but it is essentially polemical or, as E. Brunner says, ‘eristical’. We shall have to turn the proofs of God the other way about and not demonstrate God from the world but the world from God, not God from existence but existence from God—and that, too, in constant critical debate with other ways of asserting truth and showing the meaning of things. In this sense the work of ‘natural theology’ belongs not to the praeambula fidei, but to fides quaerens intellectum.
The man who is the recipient of this revelation of God in promise is identified, as what he is—and at the same time differentiated, as what he will be. He comes ‘to himself’—but in hope, for he is not yet freed from contradiction and death. He finds the way of life—but hidden in the promised future of Christ that has not yet appeared. Thus the believer becomes essentially one who hopes. He is still future to ‘himself’ and is promised to himself. His future depends utterly and entirely on the outcome of the risen Lord’s course, for he has staked his future on the future of Christ. Thus he comes into harmony with himself in spe, but into disharmony with himself in re. The man who trusts himself to the promise is of all people one who finds himself a riddle and an open question, one who becomes in his own eyes a homo absconditus. In pursuit of the promise, he finds he is in search of himself and comes to regard himself as an open question addressed to the future of God. Hence the man who hopes is of all people the one who does not stand harmoniously and concentrically in himself, but stands excentrically to himself in the facultas standi extra se coram Deo, as Luther called it. He is ahead of himself in hope in God’s promise. The event of promise does not yet bring him to the haven of identity, but involves him in the tensions and differentiations of hope, of mission and of self-emptying. If revelation encounters him as promise, then it does not identify him by disregarding what is negative, but opens him to pain, patience and the ‘dreadful power of the negative’, as Hegel has said. It makes him ready to take the pain of love and of self-emptying upon himself in the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead and who quickens the dead. ‘Yet it is not the life which abhors death and keeps itself pure of corruption, but the life which endures it and maintains itself in the midst of it, that is the life of the spirit.’ ‘The power of the spirit is only so great as its outgoing, its depth only so deep as the extent to which in its expending it ventures to spread itself and to lose itself.’ Thus the promised identity of man leads into the differentiation of self-emptying. He gains himself by abandoning himself. He finds life by taking death upon him. He attains to freedom by accepting the form of a servant. That is how the truth that points forward to the resurrection of the dead comes to him.
But if the event of promise in the resurrection identifies man by leading him to the emptying of himself, this experience of self is immediately bound up with a corresponding experience of the world. Man does not gain himself by distinguishing himself from ‘the world’, but by emptying himself into it. But in what way must the ‘world’ then be experienced? It cannot be taken as a rigid cosmos of established facts and eternal laws. For where there is no longer any possibility of anything new happening, there hope also comes to an end and loses all prospect of the realizing of what it hopes for. Only when the world itself is ‘full of all kinds of possibilities’ can hope become effective in love. ‘To hope there belongs the knowledge that in the outside world life is as unfinished as in the Ego that works in that outside world.’ Thus hope has the chance of a meaningful existence only when reality itself is in a state of historic flux and when historic reality has room for open possibilities ahead. Christian hope is meaningful only when the world can be changed by him in whom this hope hopes, and is thus open to that for which this hope hopes; when it is full of all kinds of possibilities (possible for God) and open to the resurrection of the dead. If the world were a self-contained system of cause and effect, then hope could either regard this world as itself the fulfilment, or else in gnostic fashion transcend and reflect itself into the supra-worldly realm. That, however, would be to abandon itself.
On the ground of the promised future of the truth the world can be experienced as history. The eschatological sense of the event of promise in the resurrection of Christ awakes in remembrance and expectation our sense for history. Hence every view which sees the world as a self-contained cosmos, or history as a universal whole that contains and manifests the divine truth, is broken down and transposed into the eschatological key of ‘not yet’. Our knowledge, as a knowledge of hope, has a transcendent and provisional character marked by promise and expectation, in virtue of which it recognizes the open horizon of the future of reality and thus preserves the finitude of human experience. To think God and history together on the ground of the event of promise in the resurrection of Christ, does not mean to prove God from the world or from history, but vice versa to show the world to be history that is open to God and to the future. Christian theology will thus not be able to come to terms with, but will have to free itself from, the cosmologico-mechanistic way of thinking such as is found in the positivistic sciences—whether in the positivism of the scientific disenchanting of the world, by which the world not only becomes ‘godless’, as Max Weber has said, but also becomes a world without alternatives, without possibilities and without any future, or in the factualized and institutionalized relationships of the scientific civilization of modern society, which in the same way is threatened with the loss not only of its future but of its own historic character as well. Theology will be able to free itself, however, only by breaking up this kind of thinking and these relationships and striving to set them in the eschatological movement of history. It will not be able to free itself from them by falling back upon a romanticist glorification of reality. The ‘firewood’ does not again become a ‘forest’, nor the ‘tale of events’ again become ‘sacred history’, and the traditions of the West do not again become unequivocal links in the chain of historic tradition. The experience of the world as history can hardly take the form of again considering the experience of history either in terms of fate, in that passivity in which we suffer birth and death, or in terms of chance. ‘The universal endeavour of human reason is directed towards the abolition of chance’, as W. Humboldt already aptly remarked. The scientific and technical efforts of the modern age have at least since the French revolution been aimed at bringing about the end of this kind of history, the end of the history of chance, of contingency, of surprise, crisis and catastrophe. To demonstrate to this increasingly rounded scientific and technical cosmos its own historic character does not mean revealing to it the critical nature of its own self, but exhibiting to it and to the men in it that history which is experienced in the light of the promised future of the truth. Both intellectual forms—the objectification of the world and the subjectivity of existence—stand in contrast to the history which is experienced in the light of the future of the truth. Hence for Christian theology ‘history’ cannot mean that it has again to proclaim the truth of God in combination with the old experiences of fate and chance, but that it has to give this world itself a place in the process that begins with the promise and is kept going by hope. The problem of history in the ‘modern age’ is presented not so much in terms of the difference between Greek glorification of the cosmos and the biblical hope in history, but rather in terms of the difference between a scientific and technical millenarianism, which seeks the end of history in history, on the one hand, and, on the other, an eschatology of history, which arises from the event of promise in the resurrection, and for which the ‘end of history’ in the ‘modern age’ can no more be the promised and expected end than the ‘modern age’ (Neuzeit) itself can be the ‘new age’ (neue Zeit) in the apocalyptic sense—as this expression (Neuzeit) was surely meant to be. Positivism, which was originally intended by Auguste Comte to have a thoroughly millenarian sense, can therefore be given historic character only by being transcended and superseded by the new expectations of an eschatological outlook. This will reveal its historic form and significance and the finitude of its epistemological horizon.
Christian theology has one way in which it can prove its truth by reference to the reality of man and the reality of the world that concerns man—namely, by accepting the questionableness of human existence and the questionableness of reality as a whole and taking them up into that eschatological questionableness of human nature and the world which is disclosed by the event of promise. ‘Threatened by death’ and ‘subjected to vanity’—that is the expression of our universal experience of existence and the world. ‘In hope’—that is manifestly the way in which Christian theology takes up these questions and directs them to the promised future of God.