Summary Reflections on Barth 47-71

Preaching is distinct from all other activities of the Church. In preaching (as it should be anyhow) we have the unique task of speaking not merely about God but from God. We are to speak the Word of God, to do what we cannot do without Grace being before and after us, to proclaim the Revelation of God…. to make “repetition of the divine promise.” No other Church activity can do this nor is commissioned to do this. God may, indeed, choose to reveal Himself through such other activities but on our part they are not done with the intention to speak God’s Word. They are done in obedient response to his Word and as such serve as signposts to the Revelation of God, by which others may indeed find themselves directed to God Himself. But to speak from God these activities cannot do nor are they intended to do.

In “modern” Protestant dogmatics the denial of this special role of preaching as proclamation results in the blurring of the activity with that of other Church activities. Even more, with preaching reduced to yet another symbol of one’s inner spiritual being one loses any real reason for excluding non-Christian symbols. “What needs to be said in criticism of this teaching is said clearly enough by the teaching itself. Understanding of the concept of proclamation along these lines can end only with its dissolution” (64).

In Roman Catholicism preaching can only occur on the margins, as instruction and exhortation. Yet its inability to speak a word from God is only a symptom of deeper error. Namely, that the act is considered only a preparatory grace at the most, and that by grace a connection “between a divine being as cause and a divine-creaturely being as effect. With due reservations one might even say that it understands it as a physical, not a historical, event” (68). Rather than a “personal encounter,” grace is understood as an “influence of divine-human being” (70, 68) Naturally, then, there is nothing about preaching that could elevate it above apologetical and moral instructions, nor would there be any such necessity. The relation between Christ and the Church understood as such, the speechless act of the Eucharist becomes primary. Preaching is relegated to a lesser role, and this subordination is much the more drastic than that of communion to preaching by the Reformers, a point Barth consistently emphasizes.