It was in this classical tradition of the Early Church that Karl Barth took his position early in his theological career. His road into it was through his struggle, begun in his Swiss parish, over the nature and content of divine Revelation, as he sought to expound the Scriptures and proclaim the Word of God. He soon realised that his own struggle was very much like that of both the Nicene Fathers and the Reformers, over the identity and primacy of God’s Revelation in Jesus Christ. In the fourth century the question at issue was the supreme truth of the Deity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, for if they were divided in being and act from God the Father, the Gospel would be empty of any divine content, and there would be no substance to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
In the sixteenth century the very same issue arose in another form over the doctrine of Grace, for if the gift of God were not identical with the Giver, then there could be no real Self-giving of God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit, and the Word of the Gospel would be empty of any divine reality. Here too the doctrine of the Trinity was at stake, and with it the very foundation of Christian theology. Thus Karl Barth found himself compelled to contend once again for the truth of the Nicene Creed that the incarnate Son is of one and the same being as God the Father and that the Holy Spirit is the Lord and the Giver of life. This was the essential import of the homoousion which gave dogmatic expression to the indivisible oneness in being and agency between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and thus to the fact that precisely by believing in divine Revelation the Church believes in God himself. As Barth liked to express it: ‘God reveals himself as Lord’, ‘God is the content of his Revelation.’
Thomas Forsyth Torrance ‘Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy’ Scottish Journal of Theology 39 (1986)
