Karl Barth, ‘Happening,’ and an Actualist Ontology of God

What follows below emerges from my cumulative engagement with Karl Barth’s writings over the course of sustained study rather than from a single text or citation trail. It represents a summative, interpretive exposition of Barth’s use of geschehen (“to happen”) and sich ereignen (“to occur”), and how these terms shape his actualist ontology of God. What follows is therefore a conceptual synthesis—an attempt to distill patterns and implications evident across Barth’s corpus, particularly within the Church Dogmatics, while recognizing that its evidentiary scaffolding remains to be supplied. Citations and footnotes will be developed in subsequent drafts. For now, the essay stands as a theological meditation grounded in a broad familiarity with Barth’s language and thought, tracing how the nuances of his German terminology disclose the structure of divine reality as event.

When Karl Barth writes that revelation “has happened—and happens,” he is doing more than using a vivid turn of phrase. He is performing a linguistic and ontological act that pivots the entire structure of his theology around the category of divine event. In German, the verbs Barth prefers—geschehen and sich ereignen—carry nuances that English has difficulty reproducing. They do not denote random or accidental happenings, as our “it just happened” might suggest, but acts that unfold with solemn objectivity and purposive freedom. Geschehen signals something weighty that comes to pass, while sich ereignen, reflexive in form, intimates an event that occurs in its own proper way, almost as though it claims ownership of itself. Barth deploys this vocabulary to describe revelation as the sovereign self-manifestation of God; revelation is therefore neither static possession nor doctrinal deposit. God’s word is a divine act that takes place.

In the German theological landscape of Barth’s time, this language carried philosophical resonance. Heidegger had famously employed Ereignis to name the “event of appropriation” in which being discloses itself. Barth knew this, yet his usage moves along an entirely different axis. For him, Ereignis names not the drama of (human) ontological disclosure but the concrete advent of God’s Word—God’s gracious self-giving in Jesus Christ and in the present proclamation of the gospel. The term Geschehen in his hand becomes a way of insisting that revelation is both objective and personal, temporal yet sovereignly divine. It “takes place” without becoming one occurrence among others.

In English, this precision often collapses. The word “happen” risks implying accident; “event” can sound too neutral; “history” cannot distinguish between the critical reconstruction of facts (Historie) and the living history of God’s dealings with humankind (Geschichte). Barth’s German maintains these distinctions. Revelation is Geschehen that belongs to Geschichte—a real, temporal act of God that enters human history while exceeding the reach of historical method. To speak of revelation as Geschehen is therefore to say that God’s action possesses objectivity without objectification, publicity without reduction to empirical verification.

At the heart of this linguistic subtlety lies Barth’s actualist ontology of God. The maxim “Gottes Sein ist in der Tat”—God’s being is in act—summarizes it succinctly. Barth rejects attempts to conceive God as a static substance or a set of properties to which activity is later appended. God is who God is precisely in the freedom of divine action. The perfections of God are determinations of it: holiness as holy loving, freedom as the freedom to be for us, immutability as the steadfast constancy of this free love. For Barth, the history of Jesus Christ is the decisive act in which God determines to be God for humanity. Election itself becomes the self-determination of God to be the God of this covenantal history.

To call this an “actualist ontology” is to recognize that Barth displaces the center of metaphysics from substance to event. God’s being subsists as act; rather than the eternal Word being an essence waiting to communicate, it is the communication itself. Revelation, accordingly, cannot be a possession; it must occur. The Word of God “takes place” in a threefold form—Jesus Christ, Holy Scripture, and the proclamation of the church—but it is Word of God only as God acts in and through these media. The moment God ceases to speak, the medium reverts to its creaturely form. This is what Barth means when he writes that the Word of God “has happened—and happens.” Revelation is simultaneously once for all in the incarnation and ever anew in the Spirit’s living witness.

The German language allows Barth to hold these temporal tensions together without reducing them to chronology. Geschehen—geschieht—has happened and happens—marks a rhythm of divine presence in time that preserves both the finality of Christ’s work and its ongoing actuality. English cannot capture this elasticity without paraphrase. It must choose between the past (“what happened in Christ”) and the present (“what happens to believers”), where Barth insists on both as one living movement of God’s self-communication.

The positivist mind finds this intolerable. From the standpoint of logical empiricism, to say that revelation “occurs” is either a category mistake or an empty metaphor. If “to happen” has empirical meaning, it must denote a spatiotemporal event open to verification; in that case, theology collapses into contested historiography. If it does not, then the statement “Revelation occurs” has no cognitive content at all. The positivist thus charges Barth with immunizing theology against evidence by relocating its truth into an unverifiable domain. The distinction between Historie and Geschichte, on this reading, is a convenient evasion: when the historian can no longer document an event, the theologian simply declares it Geschichte—a “different kind of history.”

Barth would recognize the challenge and reply by exposing its hidden premise. The verification principle itself, he would note, is not verifiable; it is a philosophical dogma masquerading as method. To make empirical verifiability the sole criterion of meaning is already a metaphysical act of faith. Barth would grant the positivist’s demand for objectivity, but he would redefine its source. Revelation is objective not because we can independently test it but because God gives himself to be known. The objectivity of revelation is the objectivity of divine self-attestation rather than of external measurement.

For Barth, to accuse theology of committing a category mistake by speaking of divine action in time is to misunderstand both “divine” and “time.” If God is living, then God determines the manner of divine presence. Eternity, in Barth’s sense, is not timelessness but the lordship of God over time. When revelation “occurs,” it does not make God temporal; it reveals eternity’s capacity to be present within temporality. The language of “happening” therefore names God’s own act of self-determination.

The positivist’s insistence on humanly controlled verification misidentifies knowledge with possession. Barth’s God cannot be possessed; God can only give himself. Hence revelation cannot be programmed or predicted, yet it remains public and real. The gospel is not a private vision but an event that takes place in the world—in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, in the witness of Scripture, and in the living proclamation of the church. The fact that this event depends on divine freedom rather than human control does not render it meaningless; it renders it grace.

Critics within theology have sometimes pressed Barth on whether this event-language risks excessively historicizing God or, conversely, abstracting revelation into pure transcendence. Barth’s answer is to let the two illuminate each other. The God who “becomes” in revelation is the same God whose being is unchangeable love. Divine “becoming” is not the alteration of a divine essence but the enactment of divine constancy. The once-for-all act of reconciliation in Christ is, for that reason, also the continuous act of God’s presence. What has happened—es ist geschehen—is what now happens—es geschieht.

The demand for a criterion to distinguish divine from merely religious events Barth meets by returning to Christology. The criterion is the person and work of Jesus Christ, attested by the Spirit through Scripture. Revelation is recognizable as God’s act because it conforms to this history and proceeds from it. Such a criterion will not satisfy the positivist, who seeks an independent arbiter outside theology itself. But Barth accepts this limitation; theology’s object is not subject to external measurement because the object itself—God—is the source of all reality. To know God is to be addressed by God.

Barth’s theology of the “happening” of God, therefore, is neither a denial of reason nor an appeal to mystical immediacy. It is an epistemological revolution grounded in an actualist grammar. The verbs geschehen and sich ereignen name an ontology in which God’s being is eventful, free, and relational. English readers who translate these terms merely as “happen” risk importing the notion of accident where Barth means decision, or the notion of flux where he means faithfulness.

Thus, when Barth insists that the Word of God “has happened—and happens,” he is confessing that God’s reality is contemporaneous with us. The God who once acted in Jesus Christ acts still; the event that defines all history is the living act of God’s self-revelation. Barth’s actualism becomes for us a mode of witness. To speak truly of God is to speak of what God does. It has happened, and it happens.