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(2) The Divine Initiative
The knowledge of God therefore depends entirely on the initiative
of God, and not at all on human efforts to know the Divine
Other. Thus Brunner declares “that man has no power at
his own disposal to enable him to acquire this knowledge. . . .
God cannot be found by thought. . . . The fact that this inner
movement arises in the heart of man, a movement which is the
very opposite of the sinful striving for autonomy or independence:
this is the work of the Holy Spirit.”(Footnote: 71: Op. cit.,
pp. 24, 179.
And Barth is unusually clear on this point: the man who believes,
thinks rigorously and consistently, makes a conscious
decision, that he really believed, and [[Page 137]] that he actually
had freedom to enter this new life of obedience and hope--all
this was not the work of his spirit, but the work of the Holy
Spirit.”(Footnote: 72: Knowledge of God, p. 109. And in another
work: “Knowledge of God is a knowledge completely effected
and determined from the side of its object, from the side
of God.”(Footnote: 73: Dogmatics in Outline, p. 24.
On the other hand, Brunner and Baillie, at least, grant some
instrumental significance to ordinary knowledge as a
propaedeutic to the immediate knowledge of God. While the
object of faith, according to Brunner, is not a proposition or
even a doctrine about God, when once God has revealed Himself
in direct encounter, “every ‘something’ points to ‘Himself,’
and in so doing is subordinated to Him. . . . All acts to objective,
positive knowledge are therefore merely a preparation for
this, and take a secondary position; they are not the perception
of faith itself.”(Footnote: 74: Op. cit., p. 36. Ordinary knowledge
becomes a set of pointer-readings which refer us to God
when once He is known at the higher level of encounter.
Baillie’s doctrine is similar, except that since the Divine
confrontation is universal, the instrumental character of natural
revelation is likewise universal: the immediate knowledge of