A tale of two roads: Homiletics and biblical authority

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2000 by Allen, David L

Yet Barth can and does speak of the Bible as the Word of God. It is not the Word of God in an ontological sense as we have seen. In what sense, then, is it the Word of God? "The Bible is God's Word to the extent that God causes it to be his Word, to the extent that He speaks through it. . . . The Bible, then, becomes God's Word in this event, and in the statement that the Bible is God's Word the little word `is' refers to its being in this becoming."16 For Barth, like President Clinton, it all depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is! And clearly this is a functional "is" and not an ontological "is."

Barth consistently avoids ever saying that human speech is appropriated for divine speech in the Scripture. Wolterstorff suggests two reasons why this is the case. First, Barth never rejected higher criticism and believed that its results made an inerrant text impossible. Second, Barth believed, as do most non-evangelical theologians today, that if God speaks by way of authoring Scripture, then his sovereign freedom is compromised. 17 Virtually all theologians of a non-evangelical stripe have appropriated Barth's two reasons as intransigent axioms of theology.

Many of the so-called "neo-evangelicals" have also appropriated Barth's thinking on this point. Bernard Ramm's After Fundamentalism argues that Barth's methodology is the answer to the dilemma of being a theological child of the Enlightenment and yet maintains a historical Christian faith. In describing Barth's view of how Scripture can be described as God's Word, Ramm uses the words diastasis and diffraction. By the former, Ramm means that there is an "interval" between the Word of God and the Scriptures. This interval allows for historical and literary criticism of the text without surrendering the theological integrity of the text. By diffraction Ramm means that when the Word of God enters the language of the Bible, it is no longer perfectly reflected. l8

In spite of all this, Barth and his cadre maintain that the Word of God is still to be found in the Scriptures. But this is precisely the point at issue! Who or what will tell us what is and what is not to be considered as God's word in the written Word? How is one to know when God has taken up the Bible and spoken through it?

The implications of the above discussion regarding the Barthian position on Scripture for preaching can be illustrated in an exchange that occurred between Barth and Carnell in 1962 at the University of Chicago Divinity School where Barth was lecturing. During the lectures, Carnell directed a question to Barth regarding his refusal to assert the ontological existence of the devil. Barth countered by saying that the attitudes of Jesus and the Gospel writers to the existence of Satan cannot be considered sufficient reason for affirming it. Later in the same session Barth gave a detailed analysis of the meaning of uxoTaa&ocu (submit) in Rom 13:5 and indicated that the Christian is bound to be involved in society by this verse. The problem was succinctly summed up by John W. Montgomery when he concluded, "Why bother to milk any N.T. word for its full theological import if the unwavering position of the Gospels with regard to the ontology of the demonic can be discounted?"ls