some bed time reading

Earlier this year I splashed out and bought Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics. I wondered where on earth I would put them. Calvin sleeps on my pillow during summer, and who helps me to sleep! But it has been Barth who has been sleeping on my pillow of late (not that I can see my bed at the moment!). Whilst although I dip into him for the topical reading, it is my dream and hope to work through the Church Dogmatics. Averaging only 10 to 20 pages a week, this may take a while.
So some words from my reading today....

God's Word is not a thing to be described nor a term to be defined. It is neither a matter nor an idea. It is not "a truth," not even the very highest truth. It is the truth as it is God's speaking person, Dei loquentis persona. It is not an objective reality. It is the objective reality, in that it is also subjective, the subjective that is God. God's Word means the speaking God. Certainly God's Word is not just the formal possibility of divine speech. It is the fulfilled reality. It always has a very specific objective content. God always speaks a concretissimum. But this divine concretissimum cannot as such be either anticipated or repeated. What God speaks is never known or true anywhere in abstraction from God Himself. It is known and true in and through the fact that He Himself says it, that He is present in person in and with what is said by Him.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 1.1 Doctrine of God (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 136-7