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Barth meets Austin and Searle
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seems to relieve us of the knotty problems of Biblical criticism with which
Evangelicals have traditionally wrestled. What a relief! Here is all that is
good in the classical Evangelical view without the problems!
In his book Holy Scripture Donald Bloesch freely and gratefully
admits his indebtedness to Barth. He calls the classical Evangelical view of
Scripture the "Scholastic" view. According to Bloesch, by identifying
revelation with the text of Scripture this view reduces it to a set of logical
propositions to which faith must give mental assent.{Bloesch 1994: 40-45}
Bloesch, along with Barth, sees Scripture as a human witness to God's word
through which God encounters us: "God's word is absolute, but it comes to
us in the form of the relative . . . . a historically and culturally conditioned
human witness--Holy Scripture."
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When enlightened by the Holy Spirit,
the Bible becomes God's word through which He encounters us. Faith in a
Person, Christ, is the proper response to this encounter. Bloesch differs from
Barth by affirming that revelation is prepositional truth as well as personal
encounter, nevertheless his emphasis is certainly on the latter. Revelation,
for him, is never in the text of Scripture. It is only in the text of Scripture as
used by the Holy Spirit.
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We can summarize the issues this way. Is revelation propositional--
does it give us truth about God, the world, and our relationship to Him that
can be thought, discussed, and proclaimed? Or, is revelation personal
encounter, mediated to us through the human witness of Scripture to such
encounter in the lives of the Biblical writers? Evangelicals have
traditionally affirmed the first and identified the Bible itself with God's
Word or special revelation. Barth affirms the latter. Bloesch has attempted
to join the two--with emphasis on personal encounter.
It is my belief that speech-act theory, as developed by J. L. Austin and
John Searle, helps us to clarify the difference between the classical
Evangelical and Barthian views. It also enables us to express the
Evangelical position in a way that conserves the propositional nature of
revelation and yet captures the dynamic nature of Scripture without giving
way to a Bloeschian hybrid between propositional revelation and personal
encounter. A clearer differentiation between the Evangelical and Barthian
positions also allows us to see the weakness of Barth's position with greater
perspicuity.
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{Bloesch 1994: 28, emphasis added}
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"I hold that the words of the Bible are revelatory but not revealed; they conform to the revelation and
convey the revelation through the Spirit." {Bloesch 1994: 66} "Revelation does not consist of revealed
truths that are objectively `there' in the Bible but rather in God's special act of condescension and the
opening of our eyes to the significance of this act." {Bloesch 1994: 67}