Revelation and Being and the Trinity.

The Doctrine of the Trinity, like all theology, is derived from the self-disclosure of God which is made manifest as real in faith. It can be nothing other than the interpretation of the "salvation-event" proceeding a posteriori.

Weber, 379.

Thus, Weber starts this section on the relation of the Trinity to the "salvation-event", i.e., the sending, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the subsequent outpouring of the Spirit. In this event, in this 'act', God does not reveal something other than who he is and has always been, Father, Son, and Spirit. Thus we can say that the revelation of God's being is in God's acting. Not only the revelation, but the being of God is in God's act. God is what God does. That sort of thing.

In this act, and in God's being, God is out to utterly destroy the "walled insularity of man, his enslavement to the powers and forces..." (Weber, 381). He does this, as God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. (II Cor. 5:19) He also does this through the gift, act, and "reception of the Spirit, [where] revelation becomes 'subjective reality' and thus 'possibility'" (Weber, 386). Although our knowledge of God in his revelation is imperfect because our knowledge of revelation is imperfect, this is still how we can and do know anything about God (Weber, 388).

The Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit

The thing about Scripture is the fact that its being the Word of God is not provable. There is no criterion that can "prove" it, except for the Word of God itself. This is unavoidably circular reasoning. This is where the doctrine of the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit comes in. Weber defines the doctrine in that God speaks and "proves" the Word to us in it, stating that

God is the One at work in the Holy Spirit, not only when the Word is heard but also in the fact that this Word calls forth response from us.

Weber, 241-2.

As the answer to the circular reasoning mentioned above, this understanding of Scripture with the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer is, as Barth states in note 40 on p. 243, "at its weakest point" also "its indestructible strength." One could object that anyone could simply invent the Spirit speaking internally and thus claim that God has specially given his Word. Weber holds off this idea by insisting that,

The testimony of the Spirit is perceived by me as an "I" to the degree that I hear it through the Community or in the Community.

Weber, 247.

I think that's good enough for now.