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correspondence, not only the knowledge of God, but all true knowledge would be utterly
impossible.
Some are inclined to look upon the position of Barth as a species of agnosticism. Zerbe says that
practical agnosticism dominates Barth’s thinking and renders him a victim of the Kantian
unknowableness of the Thing-in-Itself, and quotes him as follows: “Romans is a revelation of
the unknown God; God comes to man, not man to God. Even after the revelation man cannot
know God, for He is always the unknown God. In manifesting Himself to us He is farther away
than ever before. (Rbr. p. 53)”.[The Karl Barth Theology, p. 82.] At the same time he finds
Barth’s agnosticism, like that of Herbert Spencer, inconsistent. Says he: “It was said of Herbert
Spencer that he knew a great deal about the ‘Unknowable’; so of Barth, one wonders how he
came to know so much of the ‘Unknown God’.”[Ibid, p. 84.] Dickie speaks in a similar vein: “In
speaking of a transcendent God, Barth seems sometimes to be speaking of a God of Whom we
can never know anything.”[Revelation and Response, p. 187.] He finds, however, that in this
respect too there has been a change of emphasis in Barth. While it is perfectly clear that Barth
does not mean to be an agnostic, it cannot be denied that some of his statements can readily
be interpreted as having an agnostic flavor. He strongly stresses the fact that God is the hidden
God, who cannot be known from nature, history, or experience, but only by His self-revelation
in Christ, when it meets with the response of faith. But even in this revelation God appears only
as the hidden God. God reveals Himself exactly as the hidden God, and through His revelation
makes us more conscious of the distance which separates Him from man than we ever were
before. This can easily be interpreted to mean that we learn by revelation merely that God
cannot be known, so that after all we are face to face with an unknown God. But in view of all
that Barth has written this is clearly not what he wants to say. His assertion, that in the light of
revelation we see God as the hidden God, does not exclude the idea that by revelation we also
acquire a great deal of useful knowledge of God as He enters into relations with His people.
When He says that even in His revelation God still remains for us the unknown God, he really
means, the incomprehensible God. The revealing God is God in action. By His revelation we
learn to know Him in His operations, but acquire no real knowledge of His inner being. The
following passage in The Doctrine of the Word of God,[p. 426.] is rather illuminating: “On this
freedom (freedom of God) rests the inconceivability of God, the inadequacy of all knowledge of
the revealed God. Even the three-in-oneness of God is revealed to us only in God’s operations.
Therefore the three-in-oneness of God is also inconceivable to us. Hence, too, the inadequacy
of all our knowledge of the three-in-oneness. The conceivability with which it has appeared to
us, primarily in Scripture, secondarily in the Church doctrine of the Trinity, is a creaturely
conceivability. To the conceivability in which God exists for Himself it is not only relative: it is
absolutely separate from it. Only upon the free grace of revelation does it depend that the