“The best sermons are those in which one notes the preacher’s own surprise-that and the how-the text suddenly began to speak”¹ -Gerhard Von Rad

Speech and Revelation

‍One of the most ubiquitous elements of religious language is the idea that God speaks. It is a feature of all three of the Abrahamic religions, and although each conceptualizes it differently, it nonetheless occupies a significant role in their understanding of the relationship between God and humanity. Christianity often encapsulates it in the phrase “the Word of God,” which itself enjoys a prominent place in Christian theology. In fact, many churches end their liturgical reading of scripture with the call, “this is the Word of the Lord” and the response from the congregation, “thanks be to God.”

But for all its ubiquity, the philosophical explanation of God as speaker is surprisingly hazy. What do Christians mean when they say that something is “the Word of God”? In what sense is this the case? Does God speak in scripture alone, or outside of it as well? Using the work of the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, we will attempt to explain how preaching, as well as scripture, is properly the Word of God. The model we will employ is Karl Barth, whose theology of the Word of God holds significant promise for this discussion.   

Christians have often addressed the question of God as speaker by folding the idea of “the Word of God” into something akin to “the revelation of God” and thereby altogether bypassing the problem. But as Wolterstorff asserts, “speaking is not revealing” so it will not due to conflate the one with the other.² 

Central to proving this point, and to our overall goal, is speech-act theory. Initially pioneered by the British philosopher J.L. Austin, speech-act theory is predicated on a notion of language that understands words not only as descriptors of given states of affairs, e.g., “this apple is red” or “I feel tired” but also as a means of accomplishing specific actions; of doing something. Austin divides speech-acts into three different categories, two of which will be useful for this essay. The first are locutionary actions, which are simply acts of speaking or inscribing words. The second are illocutionary actions, which are actions performed by way of locutionary acts. Examples of such acts include commanding, asserting, promising, asking, or in some cases, declaring.³ Thus, in giving the command, “Come here, now!” two distinct but interrelated speech-acts have been performed. Someone performs a locutionary act in the actual uttering of the words “come here, now!” and they perform an illocutionary act by giving someone the command to “come here, now!”

However, for a locutionary act to produce a successful illocutionary one, it must meet certain external or situational criteria. For example, in the issuing of the command, “Come here, now!” the command must be issued to a given subject, e.g., one is not standing alone in a field. Secondly, the subject must be capable of responding to the command, e.g., not an inanimate object. Thirdly, the action compelled by the command must be one in which the subject is not already engaged.⁴  There are other criteria that must be present to render various speech-acts successful, but we will explain these as they come up.

Having clarified the basic tenants of speech-act theory, let us return to the above assertion that speech and revelation are not the same, and thus God’s speech and God’s revelation may not be synonymous. Take the example of a command, such as “pick up that pencil,” this is an illocutionary act by which one person compels another to perform a given task. However, in issuing the command, “pick up that pencil” is it accurate to say that revelation has occurred? Normally this is not the way commands, or many other performative speech-acts, are understood. However, someone could argue that in issuing the command, there is an implicit disclosure or revelation of the will of the speaker, thereby rendering the command is some sense revelatory.  But Wolterstorff quickly points out, “one might command someone to do something without actually intending to impel her to do it.”⁵ Such a circumstance would render the speech-act “unsuccessful,” thereby invalidating it as both in any sense revelatory or even as a legitimate performative action.⁶ 

A further example would be the act of declaring, such as in a wedding when the minister declares, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” In the appropriate context, such a declaration not only describes a given state of affairs but creates a new one. The declaration accomplishes a task which not only changes one person’s relationship to another but also their legal relationship to the state. However, such a declaration can in no sense be called revelation. 

 If we agree that not all forms of speaking are equal to revelation, what is revelation? There is not space here to delve into all the nuances and sub-types which Wolterstorff explores, so a broader understanding will have to be sufficient. Revelation, says Wolterstorff, is primarily the act of unveiling that which was veiled.⁷ That is, it is not merely the dispelling of ignorance through the dissemination of knowledge previously unknown to an individual. One person telling another, “Ulysses S. Grant’s first name was Hiram,” does not constitute revelation. This is because the opposite of the revealed is not the unknown; it is the hidden.⁸ Thus revelation consists of the unveiling of that which was previously veiled, and although speech and speech-acts accomplish this, it is not identical to them. Consequently, let us not be under the illusion that when we talk of God speaking, or of the Word of God, we mean revelation only. The startling implication of this conclusion is that we can talk of God speaking without talking about God revealing, a point which will become increasingly significant.

Barth’s Theology of the Word of God

‍We now turn our attention to the theology of Karl Barth. Barth stands in a tradition, which, following Luther, grounds the life of the Church and the task of theology primarily in the Word of God. For Luther, the Church is born of the Word and true faith and is grounded by these things alone.⁹  Barth upholds a similar line of thought by his insistence that theology is first and foremost a “scientific reflection on the Word of God.”¹⁰ This grounding of theology inevitably led to Barth’s doctrine of the three-fold Word of God, which ranks among his most well-known dogmatic achievements. Most basically stated, the doctrine’s essential proposition is that God speaks through three loci: Jesus Christ, Scripture, and Christian proclamation.¹¹ It is important to note that when Barth uses language about God’s speech, he does not have in mind some Tillichian concept of speech as a metaphor for some other act. He writes, “we have no reason not to take the concept of God’s Word primarily in its literal sense. God’s Word means that God speaks.”¹² However, only one of these loci of God’s speech Barth believes also to be properly called revelation, that is, Jesus Christ. As McCormack notes, “The Word of God is first of all that speaking of God which is identical with God; identical, because it is speaking by God. Barth calls this form of the Word “revelation.”¹³ Barth proposes that only God can truly reveal Godself, and thus God is revealed only in the Self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Other human speech may reveal something about God, God’s attributes, for example, but it is only in Jesus that God reveals Godself. Not something about God; God. This is the primary and eternal revelatory speech of God, of which the other two forms are derivative. 

The second and third forms, Scripture and Christian proclamation, may become the Word of God through their witnessing to the revelatory event of Jesus Christ, but they are not themselves revelation. Their standing as the Word of God is purely derivative from their proclamation of Jesus Christ, who is truly God’s eternal speech and eternal self-revelation. Thus, scripture stands as the first witness to Jesus Christ, composed by those who lived and walked with him, who beheld his glory and heard his voice. It is, “the record of a unique hearing of a unique call and unique obedience to a unique command.”¹⁴ For those of us who will never experience the self-revelation of God in Jesus face to face, the witness of scripture becomes the essential mediating agent of this revelation. “Holy Scripture is the witness of the prophets which was engendered by their encounter with… the speaking of God to them. As the testimony of the prophets and apostles, Holy Scripture is a piece of history and, as such, does not continue. It is a piece of the past and is as far from us as all things are which belong to the past.”¹⁵ Thus scripture becomes normative for Christian preaching, but because of its historical fixedness, it is always in need of continued proclamation. 

This leads to the third form of the Word of God and constitutes God’s speech in the present. As such, it “proceeds from a double origin in revelation and scripture… this double origin is very important. It means that it will not be sufficient merely to appeal to scripture. Not even the repetition of the words of scripture would be the Word of God. Nor is it possible to appeal directly to revelation, apart from scripture. The first would be a mere historical report, the second, a product of the human imagination.”¹⁶ Thus Christian proclamation, like Holy Scripture, becomes the Word of God in its witnessing to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. It is only when the Holy Spirit grasps the hearer through the event of proclamation that the words that the human speaks become the speech of God.¹⁷ This again bears a strong resemblance to Luther’s understanding of the Word preached when he asserts that “God gives no one his Spirit…apart from the external Word which goes before.”¹⁸ 

Having given a brief outline of Barth’s theology of the Word of God, we may now begin an examination of it in light of Wolterstorff’s divine speech-act theory. First, note that Barth immediately constructs a definition of divine speech which is incompatible with our own. We have already asserted that divine speech and divine revelation are not the same things. However, it would appear that Barth disagrees since for him, “revelation, in its strictest, most proper and original sense, is defined…as a speaking by God.”¹⁹ This is why Scripture and Proclamation are only the “Word of God” in a derivative sense. Only God can reveal Godself, and since neither Scripture nor Proclamation is God’s direct self-revelation, neither are they properly the Word of God. Instead, they become the Word of God when they are used by the Holy Spirit to grasp the hearer with the reality of God’s eternal self-revelation in Christ; in this event, they become what they in themselves are not. However, we must now ask the question, following Wolterstorff, can this event indeed be called the speech of God? Clearly, in such circumstances, God is working and active, but is it speaking?²⁰ 

Unsurprisingly, Wolterstorff concludes that it is not. The event which Barth believes occurs to effectually make Scripture and Proclamation into the Word of God is not itself the speech of God. Instead, “What God does, in addition, is bring about what God said in Jesus Christ…but that “bringing about” is something different from speaking.”²¹ Thus for Barth, “God speaks in Jesus Christ, and only there, then on multiple occasions, God activates, ratifies, and fulfills in us what God says in Jesus Christ.”²² However, if one is willing to admit a difference between divine speech and divine revelation, there may be a way to preserve Barth’s three-fold Word of God in a way that renders both Scripture and Proclamation as truly the speech of God.

Wolterstorff sees this as a possibility through the application of speech-act theory, especially by what he calls modes of double-agency discourse. There are different species of this kind of discourse, often with some degree of overlap between them. The first kind of double-agency discourse is what Wolterstorff calls authorization. This phenomenon, like many speech-acts, is surprisingly common in everyday life. Take, for example, a CEO who wishes to disseminate information to her employees, but does not have the time to write a memo herself. She could very well inform her secretary of the message she wishes to communicate, and in so doing, authorizes her secretary to speak on her behalf. The ensuing memo, though not written by the CEO, will nevertheless count as her own words because she has authorized them. This kind of double-agency discourse occurs on a spectrum, from the dictation of the content of the message by one person to another to the commission of a text without any explicate communication of its content.²³ In either of these cases, varied as they may be, the locutionary act of one person counts as the illocutionary act of another through the process of authorization.

A second closely related form of double-agency discourse is the phenomenon of deputized speech. In this situation, one person performs an illocutionary act in the name of someone else, and in so doing, ascribes the action to that person. A primary example would be the relationship between an ambassador and her president. The ambassador has been deputized by the president to speak in her name and on her behalf, and in so doing, the locutionary acts of the ambassador count as the illocutionary acts of the president.²⁴ Note also that “deputation will often take the form of deputation to say something of a certain sort – then only if certain events take place, or certain conditions arrive.”²⁵ However, in deputizing a person to speak in a given situation about a given topic, the deputy is rarely simply a messenger for another person. This is significant since it means that within the prescribed situation, the deputy has the power to speak for and as the one who has deputized them, thereby enlarging their authority.

The final form is what Wolterstorff refers to as appropriated discourse. Take, for example, a situation in which John declares, “I want some ice cream,” and Pete responds, “Me too!” In such an instance, Pete has appropriated the illocutionary act of John to be his own through a separate locutionary act. Additionally, it is significant to note that in many such events, the one person can be appropriating some, but not all, of another person’s speech. In such instances, “to get from the propositional content of the appropriated discourse to that of the appropriating discourse requires subtlety and sensitivity of interpretation.”²⁶ That is, in appropriating the discourse of another as my own, I may not wish to appropriate the entirety of their illocutionary act, or I may be appropriating it for purposes and motives different from theirs. Nevertheless, by the performance of an appropriating speech-act, a single illocutionary act may be done through separate and distinct locutionary ones.

The applications of these types of double-agency discourse to the problem of Barth’s three-fold Word of God are numerous and instructive. By viewing human proclamation as authorized or deputized divine discourse one can affirm that God truly does speak through finite human speech and one can support this position without the use of Barth’s “relentless eventism” in which human speech becomes the Word of God only in the event of its being made so by the Holy Spirit.²⁷ Barth’s attempt to articulate the details of this event, “how revelation reaches human beings through creaturely media,” was always left a mystery. In seeking to explain this, he admits, “all we know is that God Himself does really avail Himself of this medium.”²⁸ In viewing human speech as the Word of God because of its divine authorization, deputation, or appropriation, one bypasses this problematic “eventism” altogether. This move also allows one to affirm what Barth’s position finally does now allow; that is that human speech is in a real sense the speech of God. As we discussed above, Barth’s position grants that God does something through Scripture and Proclamation, but this something is not speech. By contrast, an application of Wolterstorff’s speech-act theory, as proposed above, allows one to view human speech as in a real sense the illocutionary act of God.

Some Possible Objections to Our Position‍

Let us now make some clarifying remarks and address some possible objections to the above arguments. First, in making the above move, one is not denying that the Spirit plays a vital role in making the proclamation effectual, only that the Holy Spirit does not in making it so effectual, also make it the Word of God. That is, it has the character of being the Word of God apart from its being made effectual by the Spirit of God. One need only think of the Old Testament prophets who proclaimed the Word of the Lord seemingly without effect to see that the efficacy of the proclamation does not determine its origin.

Another possible objection to our position is that in making finite human speech to sometimes function as divine speech, one compromises the freedom of God. This is a fundamental reason why Barth refuses to make either Scripture or Proclamation the Word of God in the same sense as Jesus Christ; God and God alone speaks for God.²⁹ But is God’s commissioning of a human being to speak in the name of God or on God’s behalf a limitation of God’s freedom? If so, Wolterstorff writes, “then perhaps we have to take seriously the possibility that God is willing on occasion to limit God’s freedom in that way.”³⁰ However, it is difficult to see how a situation such as deputation or appropriation does actually limit God’s freedom at all.³¹ 

Finally, one might object that in making human speech to sometimes count as divine speech through the means we have proposed, one must face the question of how fallible or even outright erroneous human words can, in any sense, be the Word of God. Indeed, this was one of the critical problems that Barth’s doctrine allowed him to avoid by holding that scripture became the Word of God by its witness to Christ and not due to its own faultlessness. He could even say that scripture constituted a single message not by the cohesiveness of its many doctrines but by the unity of its witness to Christ. It would seem that one can avoid the same problems equally well through something like the appropriation model of divine-discourse. As we have already noted above, one person can be appropriating some, but not all, of another person’s speech. In such instances “to get from the propositional content of the appropriated discourse to that of the appropriating discourse requires subtlety and sensitivity of interpretation.”³² But on such occasions, it does not mean the locutionary action which appropriates the illocutionary one fails in its appropriation. Rather, it simply means one appropriates only part of the content, and thus one must engage in “subtlety and sensitivity of interpretation” to distinguish between the two.  

Conclusion and Some Ecclesiological Ramifications‍

If we conclude that under certain conditions and at certain times, fallible human proclamation (i.e., ecclesial preaching)  may count as the Word of God, what are the ramifications of such a belief for the life and theology of the Church?

 This question was of primary importance to Barth, and his development of the threefold Word of God may be seen, at least in part, as an attempt to address the nature of the Church as being both human and divine in its ontological grounding; a problem which had vexed many theologians before him, including Calvin.³³ For Barth, the doctrine of the three-fold Word helped to explain God as at once both wholly other from, and yet genuinely present with, humanity. God gives Godself in “real presence” in the incarnation of Jesus and again in the continuation of the Spirits’ activity in the life of the Church through Scripture and proclamation.³⁴ It would seem that our reinterpretation of Barth’s doctrine in light of Wolterstorff’s speech-act theory still leaves these ecclesiological consequences intact. That is, we can say along with Barth, perhaps even in a stronger voice, that God condescends through his appropriating and deputation of human speech to make it His own. This radical conclusion has several serious implications for the life of the Church.

First, it necessitates reverence for the practice of ecclesial proclamation. This is an obvious conclusion, but one which is always in need of repetition.  Because Protestantism lacks the sacerdotal theology of Roman Catholicism, its justification for the ordination of clergy must reside elsewhere. The question then becomes, how can Protestants theologically justify practices such as the ordination of clergy without reducing them to matters of symbolism or church polity? It would seem that the divine-speech act theory we have proposed might be at least one answer to this question. If we are to say that God truly speaks at times through the deputation of human voices, then who those human voices are is significant. Those who take on the role of ecclesial proclamation must understand and prepare for the task of proclaiming through their fallible humanity the Word of God.  

This same consideration also raises questions about who is allowed to be the deputy and bringer of God’s Word. Giving expression to what a pastor “is” is a profoundly challenging task. However, if what we have said thus far is true, then the pastor must at least in part be a prophet and a poet. They are to be the voice of God, to deliver the Words of God to the people of God as the instrument of God. If one conceives of a pastor in this way, they ought to be highly reticent about disqualifying anyone from this role based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or social status. Disqualifying someone on these grounds means that the calling to proclaim the Word of God is conditioned by external or biological characteristics, not by God Himself, or worse, to say that God never calls people of this or that type. Once someone makes this move, the possibility of removing part of another person’s full humanity comes into view.

What we say about the nature of Christian proclamation matters profoundly for the life of the Church. Barth knew this, and because of this, he wrestled profoundly with the doctrine of the Word of God. His theological convictions in this area became the cornerstone of his dogmatic project, especially his ecclesiology. What this essay has done is not discredit Barth’s work, but rather aided it by employing a resource which Barth may not have considered. In applying Wolterstorffian speech-act theory to the doctrine of the Word of God, we have not said less than what Barth, but a good deal more. We can say that both scripture and human proclamation may be the speech of God, not in a derivative or partial sense, but fully and completely.

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