GO*GL - Karl Barth, notes/quotes [GO*GL Mobile] [GO*GL Web] [Guest Services]*"The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths." --attributed to Karl Barth by Christianity Today Magazine, 1/1/2000 --see link #19, above "..Barth's prophetic opposition to Nazism, which reverberates in the great Barmen Declaration of 1934, is still studied and pondered as a powerful Christian witness against the idolatry of nation and race.." - Daniel L. Migliore "Its thrust is that since Jesus Christ is the one Word of God, the Church is not to recognize other events, powers, or images alongside Him as divine revelation." Source: Haddon Willmer, Ph.D., University of Leeds, England (NIDCC, Editor: J.D. Douglas, 1978, Zondervan, p. 104) Gospel and Law (1935) "..we will keep and fulfill the Law and all its commandments if we have faith in Jesus Christ..which clings to him and remains true to him, simply because he is the eternal incarnate Word, which has accomplished all things. This faith includes all obedience. Our works, great and small, internal and external, are accepted if they take place as works of this faith--and they are rejected if they do not..precisely this faith, which allows Jesus Christ the right to be its representative, is the work and gift of the Holy Spirit, which we cannot appropriate to ourselves, but for which we can only pray." Church and State (1938) "..In what sense..can we..must we follow Zwingli, who..speaks in the same breath of 'divine and human justice'? ¶It should be noted that interest in this question begins where the interest in the Reformation confessional writings and Reformation theology as a whole ceases..or begins to fade [fn#1]..they do not..tell us all that we might have expected--excepting Luther in his word Of Worldly Authorities [1523] or Calvin in the majestic closing chapters of his Institutes..we need to know not only that the two ['divine and human justice'] are not in conflict, but, first and foremost, to what extent they are connected. ¶ [E.g.]..Zwingli's strong statement [fn#5], that secular power has 'strength and assurance from the teaching and action of Christ' [where] the disappointing explanation of this statement consists only in the fact that in Matthew 22:31 Christ ordained that we should render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's, and that by paying customary 'tribute money'..he himself confirmed this teaching. That is again quite true in itself [fn#6], but, when stated thus apart from its context..it is based not on the Gospel but on the Law." "..the Church on earth should not go beyond its own bounds and endow itself with the predicates of the heavenly State, setting itself up in concrete fashion against the earthly State as the true State. That it could..cannot possibly be the meaning of Ephesians 2 and I Corinthians 6..[where]..the heavenly State is and remains exclusively the heavenly State, established not by man but by God, which, as such, is not capable of realization in this age, not even in the Church..It is far more true that [the Church has] here no abiding city...that the earthly Church stands over against the earthly State as a sojourning (paroikia) and not as a State within the State, [n]or..above the State, as was later claimed by the Papal Church of Rome, and widened also by many a fanatical sect." The Church and the War (1944) "..war cannot be fought on any other presupposition than that we human beings have no faults to reckon up against one another before God, but only to forgive them to one another...War is..the dreadful ultimate instrument for restoration of the public order, broken and destroyed by mutual guilt..The more readily we realize and admit that we all stand equally under God's judgment..that this war in itself can assume the character of a serious 'police action', which, while bringing unavoidable suffering to all, may be a defense of the 'righteous' state**--and the less we (who are all in similar need of God's forgiveness) concentrate the war effort on any single guilty person or nation--the more coldbloodedly and energetically will the war be waged, for then, and only then, can we have a good conscience in this hard and terrible business..we must give heed to Romans 13:1, 7..we must place beside [Rom. 13:1,7] the words of Romans 3:23, and in this relation realize the whole political as well as Christian truth." -Karl Barth, The Church and the War 1944, The Macmillan Co., pp. 26,7 Christian Community and Civil Community (1946) "One cannot in fact compare the Church with the State without realizing how much weaker, poorer, and more exposed to danger the human community is in the State than in the Church." ¶"It would be inadvisable, however, to make too much of the comparison. According to the fifth thesis of the Theological Declaration of Barmen (1934), the Christian community also exists in 'the still unredeemed world,' and there is not a single problem harassing the State by which the Church is not also affected in some way or other. From a distance it is impossible to clearly distinguish the Christian from the non-Christian, the real Christian from the doubtful Christian even in the Church itself. Did not Judas..participate in the Last Supper?" Misc. "In the Resurrection the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but touches it as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it." "..the wisdom of God in Christ is a 'wisdom in mystery' unknown to the rulers of this world, not seen by any eye, not heard by any ear, having entered into no man's heart, accessible only to the spirit [pneuma] of God Himself and through the spirit [pneuma] of God Himself...Man must receive not only the Word from Christ but also the spirit [pneuma] by which it is known, or he will not know it at all..The Modernist view from which we must demarcate ourselves here goes back to the Renaissance and especially to the Renaissance philosopher Descartes with his proof of God from human self-certainty..in theology one cannot think along Cartesian lines.." "..while the being of the Church is identical with Jesus Christ...the place from which the way of dogmatic knowledge is to be seen and understood can be neither a prior anthropological possibility nor a subsequent ecclesiastical reality, but only the present moment of the speaking and hearing of Jesus Christ Himself, the divine creation of light in our hearts*..." [* "..out of darkness light shall shine..shining is He within for enlightenment of the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of Christ.." II Cor. 4:6, cp. e.g., NetBible] "In the light of the fact that Jesus Christ is the being of the Church, the free personal decision may be expected concerning what is the proper content of Christian utterance..the expectation of the decision of the Lord..[thus the]..Church ventures to talk about God, or to regard what it says as talk about God..If God exists for man, as the Church's prayer, praise and confession declare in answer to the proclamation heard, then this man for whom God exists must also exist for his fellow-men with whom alone he is real man. Yet the special utterance about God which consists in the action of this man is primarily and properly directed to God and not to men. It can neither try to enter into quite superfluous competiton with society's necessary efforts at self-help in its straits, nor can it seek, as the demonstration of distinctly Christian action, to proclaim how God helps...If the social work of the Church as such were to try to be proclamation, it could only become propaganda..the Church's education of youth cannot as such seek to be proclamation...The education of youth has to teach and not to convert, not to bring to a decision, and to this extent not to proclaim..the theme..understood in this sense is obviously none other than that which the older Protestant theology, in its resistance to Roman Catholicism and to the incipient Modernism, treated under the title De scriptura sacra...the cardinal statement of the doctrine of the Word of God..is indeed materially the same as the assertion of the authority and normativeness of the Holy Scripture as the witness to divine revelation and the presupposition of Church proclamation.." "..proclamation is preaching, i.e., the attempt by someone called thereto in the Church, in the form of an expositon of some portion of the biblical witness to revelation, to express in his own words..to the people of his own generation the promise of the revelation, reconciliation and vocation of God..here and now..¶Modernist dogmatics is..unaware of the fact that in relation to God man has constantly to let something be said to him, has constantly to listen to something, which he constantly does not know and which in no circumstance and in no sense can he say to himself.." "..in the unveiling of God there is to be seen and acknowledged His veiling..Only in the consummation when faith ceases altogether can we imagine man no longer needing but relieved of this reverse moment of faith, this recollection of the secularity of the Word of God..Freed by the Word of God, he must be taken captive again by the same the Word. He must be placed again before God, which means before God who is concealed in his concealment. What could experience of God's unveiling be but superbia..? Roman Catholic and Protestant [theologies of glory constantly appeal] to this experience [failing] to see that in abandoning the indirectness of the knowledge of God [they have] immediately abandoned true faith and the real Word of God as well..An important difference between faith and mysticism is that the mystic as such denies this reversal; in ecstasy before unveiled Deity he ceases to be aware of the veiling...[while] the triumphant believer..seeks his future only (and genuinely so) in the God who is totally concealed..[concealed] from him as from every other sinner..[having]..an assurance that the mystic as such can never have.." "Thanksgiving services were held in all the churches, including those here in Switzerland, for the preservation of peace. Six months later Hitler had violated this infamous accord of Munich. A year later he was in Poland..That is when the East-West problem arose. And that is when Europe and Christendom slept...[However,] no one in the West has the right to believe in the inevitability or the desirability of war or to meet Russia as Hitler had to be faced. We do not face the glorification of war and we must, therefore, express our resolution to oppose communism without falling into fear and hatred or into war-like talk and action."--Nazism and Communism, Karl Barth, from a letter which allegedly appeared in the Journal Christianity and Crisis, February..1951. "In being gracious to man in Jesus Christ, God acknowledges man; He accepts responsibility for his being and nature. He remains Himself. He does not cease to be God. But He does not pass him by as did the priest and the Levite the man who had fallen among thieves...God is not proud." "..in the effort to excuse and justify ourselves, we can only hate God and our neighbor.." "..the eternal, almighty God can be known only as God relates to humanity as a suffering servant" [Ronald Goetz, christiancentury.org]: "..False gods are all reflections of a false and all too human self-exaltation. They are all lords who cannot and will not be servants, who are therefore no true lords, whose being is not a truly divine being.." "..on Romans 7:11, '[Religion] is that human necessity in which the power exercised over men by sin is clearly demonstrated.' '..[Christ's] revelation necessarily appears as something particular in the field of the universal that one calls religion..' '..Christianity is surely peculiar..but not unique..' 'Like the justified man, the true religion is a creature of grace' '...among the religions only one thing is decisive concerning truth and falsehood...the name Jesus Christ'" Karl Barth (C.D.)--via Garrett Green, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion, T&T Clark, 2006, pp. 8, 13, 19, 21 | @ books.google.com "In [the] movement from a narrower to a wider usage, the statement 'God with us' is the center of the Christian message - and always in such a way that it is primarily a statement about God and only then and for that reason a statement about us...it is instructive to recall that this 'God with us' is the translation of the remarkable Emmanuel which is mentioned three times in Isa 7:14, 8:8,10 and according to Matt 1:21 ff. finds its fulfillment in the name of Jesus." "..the real catastrophe of modern Protestant theology was not..retreat..Rather, its catastrophe--without which the modern world view, the modern self-conception of man, etc., would not have been able to harm it--was this: that it lost its object, revelation, in its particularity and with it the mustard seed of faith by which it could have moved mountains, even the mountain of modern humanistic culture."
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