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1 The Biblical Understanding of the Word of God Though appropriated by human conceptuality, the word of God is not a word about God but a word from God and thereby a word through which God discloses himself to us. Since it enacts history, God's word is not separable from God's actions. Jesus Christ is God's final word both as God's ultimate self-disclosure and as bringing history to completion through God's redemptive word and work. The incarnation of God's word inJesus Christ opens for us full access to God. THE WORD AS THE MEANS OF GOD'S SELF-DISCLOSURE When we reflect on "the word of God," the question emerges whether we mean a word about God oifrom God. In his incisive essay "What Does It Mean to Speak of God?" (1923), Rudolf Bultmann attempted to clear the issue: "If 'speaking of God' is understood as 'speaking about God,' then such speaking has no meaning whatever, for its subject, God, is lost in the very moment it takes place."1 If God is the reality determining all else, speaking about God would be a contradiction, since it presupposes a standpoint external to what is being talked about. Since there can be no standpoint external to God, it is not legitimate to speak about God in general statements that presume to be valid without reference to the concrete, existential position of the speaker. Karl Barth sensed a similar difficulty when he stated: "As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. Wc ought therefore to recognize both, our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the Glory."* But Bultmann does not abandon the difficult task of proclaiming the word of God, and neither does Barth. Bultmann continues, "We can speak of him [God] only in so far as we are 257 1 0 / THE MEANS OF GRACE speaking of his Word spoken to us, of his act done to us. 'Of God we can only tell what he does to us,'" he concludes, quoting Wilhelm Herrmann.3 Since we are on earth, we cannot speak of God in the true sense. But unless we want to recede into mystical silence, we must speak about God, though knowing that any speech about God is necessarily inadequate. We conclude from these considerations, informed by Stfren Kierkegaard's insistence on the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity, that any word about God cannot be a word that has humanity as its initiator. To be of any significance in "describing God," it must be a word that describes us as we understand ourselves addressed by God. A word about God is a reflec­ tion of God's word to us. A word about God cannot be a descriptive state­ ment about God, but it can be an approximation of how God acts with us. Paul Tillich captured this situation well when he stated, "Everything religion has to say about God, including his qualities, actions, manifestations, has a symbolic character and . . . the meaning of 'God' is completely missed if one takes the symbolic language literally." Asking whether a nonsymbolic state­ ment about God is possible, Tillich concludes: "There is a point at which a nonsymbolic assertion about God must be made . . . , namely, the state­ ment that everything we say about God is symbolic."4 Any word about God has at best symbolic character, but this does not mean it is of no value. Tillich distinguishes between "sign" and "symbol," saying, "While the sign bears no necessary relation to that to which it points, the symbol participates in the reality of that for which it stands."' A religious symbol not only points to the divine; if it is a true symbol, it also participates in the power of the divine. Reviewing the abundant literature about God, one wonders, however, whether the symbols advocated actually disclosed much about God, since there seems to be little consensus about them. Wolfgang Trillhaas characterized the situation apdy: "Each dogmatician, especially among the modern ones, decrees the attributes [of God] differently than another, so that one cannot refute the impression that this process is governed by a certain arbitrary speculation which is nourished by the richness of biblical and at the same time philosophical tradition."6 Friedrich Schleiermacher sensed this subjective and speculative tendency when he noted that after the age of scholasticism, metaphysics was treated separately from Christian doctrine, in...

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