Abstract
In his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth cautions against straightforwardly identifying Scripture as a constant locus of divine revelation, lest we presume that readers of Scripture can possess or domesticate God’s self-disclosing activity. Though agreeing that we need to maintain God’s sovereign initiative in his revelation, this essay will characterize the Bible as ongoing divine speech within the context of a doctrine of God’s simplicity and freedom that will enable us to construe the canon of Scripture as written revelation without implying that human beings gain control of God’s revelatory work. A recovery of divine simplicity helps in understanding both the ontological and the epistemological dimensions of biblical revelation. First, in his simplicity, God always acts in the fullness of his being and by his indivisible, infinite essence, which means that in his communicative operation in Scripture God (or God’s action) invariably exceeds the text itself. Second, in his simplicity, God is truly but never fully revealed to finite creatures who are unable to comprehend God’s singular plenitude. These considerations will signal that God can and does continually speak in the biblical text without foregoing the transcendence of his self-revelation.
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