Witness to the Word. Karl Barth

Barth’s Lectures on John (chs. 1–8), which he himself did not publish, came at the important period when he was turning his attention more fully to dogmatics. Their significance will be immediately apparent to students of Barth, for, although he displayed a keen linguistic and even textual interest, theological interpretation formed his primary concern in keeping with his deepest hermeneutical convictions. In this regard he found only the slightest use for the Mandean materials that he borrowed from Bultmann, for he believed that the author, like himself, bent to his own purposes the things that he took from other sources. Of more interest to Barth was the relation that he discerned in the Gospel between revelation and the witness to revelation, for this helped to shape his own formulation of the role of the written (and spoken) Word vis-à-vis the incarnate Word. The exposition of ch. 1, to which the present translation is restricted, and which covers almost half the book, lies at the heart and basis of his own equation of revelation and incarnation, which gives to Christ, Revealer and Revealed, a crucial position in God’s revealing and reconciling work, and which involves the paradox of the incognito whereby revealing is concealing except for those who by the Spirit and in faith behold the glory of the Logos. For Barth, of course, the prologue seemed so self-evidently to vindicate christological orthodoxy that he could ground his own christology in the Nicene statement and find illumination in patristic exposition. Incidentally, his discussion of the meaning of the Word’s taking “flesh” exposes the emptiness of the objection sometimes raised against the Dogmatics that Barth impugns the sinless perfection of the Son.

Inevitably the gap between the delivery of these Lectures and their publication means that they cannot profit by the able scholarship that has been devoted to John in the intervening period. Yet they add so much to our understanding of the younger Barth and his development, and they offer such valuable insights to students of this seminal Gospel, that little excuse is needed for their belated appearance. With slight modifications (including references to English translations where available, transliterating the Greek, and some rearrangement of the paragraphs), the present translation adopts the apparatus described and used in the Swiss edition, and it takes over the Swiss indexes insofar as they relate to the first chapter of John.

Pasadena, Ascensiontide 1984

Geoffrey W. Bromiley

PREFACE

In Göttingen Karl Barth gave secondary lectures on various New Testament books and passages (Ephesians, James, 1 Corinthians 15, 1 John, Philippians, Colossians, and the Sermon on the Mount).1 When he began to teach at Münster in 1925 and 1926, he offered John’s Gospel as a main course, rejoicing in the greater freedom he now had to teach dogmatics and New Testament exegesis. His secondary one-hour course was on eschatology.2 The lectures on John are unique in this regard: When he had only reached 1:12 a former student gave to Eduard Thurneysen the enthusiastic report that Barth was even giving some instruction in philology.3 Thurneysen passed on this verdict, commenting that Barth was now “in his tunnel,” and in reply Barth stated that he was indeed deep in the tunnel of John, for some unknown spirit was impelling him to write out everything twice, which made it all much more vivid. He liked the bit about philology. This naive impression arose out of the fact that now, as he ought to have done long ago in Aargau and had gradually learned to do at Göttingen, he was drawing his new wisdom from the Greek concordance.4 On January 17, 1926, Barth admitted to his friends that he had only reached ch. 4. People were cooperating enthusiastically, and if he now had a new smack of scholarship, this might be touching and encouraging but it did not avert his many fits of depression or his plans to retreat to a rural parish in Switzerland or something similar.5 Three days later he told Thurneysen that he everywhere reached much the same results in expounding John. The only thing that surprised him was that the serpent in the wilderness made less impression on his friend than on himself. This animal, or its lifting up, seemed to him to be of great eschatological significance.6 A most instructive letter is that which he sent to his brother Heinrich on January 30, 1926,7 in which he told him about the lectures but said that unfortunately he was only at ch. 6 and would not finish by a long way.8 He found it a most remarkable book. Often the whole room seemed to go round when he considered the ramifications of this chapter and found astonishing things that previous exegesis had missed. He thought it an advantage of theologians over philosophers that their studies are subject to canonical texts of this kind. He had no taste for the Johannine question or the answers to it. He constantly had his father’s exposition by him.9 His father thought it important that the son of Zebedee was the author, and if this was true, then the historical scandal was all the more unheard-of. It was odd that twenty or thirty years before this time people had not found it so, viewing it as settling rather than unsettling simply that an eyewitness had supposedly written

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