Not Lost!

“Why did the Son of God become man, one of us, our brother, our fellow in the human situation? The answer is: In order to judge the world. But… in order to judge it in the exercise of His kingly freedom to show His grace in the execution of His judgment, to pronounce us free in passing sentence, to free us by imprisoning us, to ground our life on our death, to redeem us and save us by our destruction. That is how God has actually judged in Jesus Christ. That is why He humbled Himself. That is why He went into the far country as the obedient Son of the Father. That is why He did not abandon us, but came amongst us as our brother. That is why the Father sent Him. That was the eternal will of God and its fulfillment in time—the execution of this strange judgment. If this strange judgment had not taken place, there would be only a lost world and lost men.Since it has taken place, we can only recognize and believe and proclaim to the whole world and all men: Not lost!”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 222]

Barth on Penal Substitutionary Atonement

“The Son of God in His unity with the Israelite Jesus exists in direct and unlimited solidarity with the representatively and manifestly sinful humanity of Israel. Everything which can be said against it, everything which is said against it, not by men, but by God speaking through His prophets—He allows to be said against Him.”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 172]

… the true and positive and genuinely indescribable joy of the one who loves consists simply in the fact that he may love as one who is loved by God, as the child of God; that as he imitates the divine action he may exist in fellowship with Him, obedient to His Holy Spirit. This is exaltation and gain; this is peace and joy. This is a reason for laughing even when our eyes swim with tears. For in face of this what is the significance of all the cares and failures which even those who love as Christians are certainly not spared? This is the blessedness of him who loves — unsought, unplanned and undesired — even when his love beats against a stone wall, receiving no answer, or only a more or less hostile answer, from the one whom he loves. He does not love him for the sake of his answer, but because he is made free to do so by God.
» Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2 (via wesleyhill)

Blowing His Little Trumpet

“Man only wants to judge. He thinks he sits on a high throne, but in reality he sits only on a child’s stool, blowing his little trumpet, cracking his little whip, pointing with frightful seriousness his little finger, while all the time nothing happens that really matters. He can only play the judge.…

[And yet] When man sets out to exercise his own power to judge, is not the essential thing which he achieves something which for its insubstantiality is palpably and painfully real – the formation both microcosmically and macrocosmically of a world which is darkened and disrupted and bedeviled by its own self-righteousness? On the little stool which he thinks is a throne, man does create facts. He dreams, but even when he dreams, he himself is not a dream but in all his corruption he is the real man who…has in fact broken peace with God and himself and other men, who thinks he knows about good and evil, who in his factuality can only be described.”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 446–7]

A Joyful Action

“There is one final point. The knowledge of God as participation in the veracity of the revelation of God is a work of gratitude. But this means that it cannot take place except in joyfulness. There can be no acknowledgement of the revelation of God unless we ourselves are involved. But, involved in this way, we are placed strictly under the rule of the object and become obedient. This obedience, however, can only mean that we are ourselves requisitioned to be doers of this work. If the revelation reaches us, if it becomes for us the necessary basis of our knowledge, this does, of course, mean that it approaches us from without, but it also means—how else can it reach us?—that it does actually come to us and therefor into us. It does not cease to transcend us, but we become immanent to it, so that obedience to it is our free will.

But because God remains transcendent to us even in His revelation, the subjectivity of our acknowledgment of His revelation means our elevation above ourselves. It is this that of necessity makes our knowledge of God a joyful action. A gratitude that consists in an involuntary, mutinous and therefore forced and unjoyful action is not thanksgiving. A tribute to tyranny, however paid, is not thanks. A sacrifice offered in dread and constraint is not, in the biblical sense at least, a real sacrifice. Sacrifice and thanks are only what is offered gladly. And the basis which make s the true knowledge of God necessary is in itself the basis of knowing God gladly.”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 219]

To Be the Theatre of His Glory

“And if we inquire in to the goal of creation, the object of the whole, the object of heaven and earth and all creation, I can only say that it is to be the theatre of His glory. The meaning is that God is being glorified. Doxa, gloria, means quite simply to become manifest. God wills to be visible in the world; and to that extent creation is a significant action of God. ‘Behold, it was very good.’ Whatever objections may be raised against the reality of the world, its goodness incontestably consists in the fact that it may be the theatre of His glory, and man the witness to this glory. We must not desire to know a priori what goodness is, or to grumble if the world does not correspond to it. For the purpose for which God made the world it is also good. ‘The theatre of His glory, theatric gloriae Dei’, says Calvin of it. But man is the witness; he who is allowed to be where God is made glorious, is not a merely passive witness; the witness has to express what he has seen. That is man’s nature, that is what he is able to do, to be a witness of God’s acts. This purpose of God ‘justifies’ Him as the Creator.”

[Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 58]

He and Not I!

“The free decision of man, the act and work of man, the life of real men, is revealed in the fulfillment of revelation as the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But it does not have its character as the life of the children of God from itself, but from the light in which it is placed. No positive—and we must add at once, no negative—description of what man does or does not do can clearly reproduce, in the strict sense, the ‘Christian’ character of his life and activity and suffering. It acquires this character only ‘from outside,’ that is, from God. What is essentially ‘Christian’ in this life and doing and not doing can only be the declaration: He and not I! He and not we! He, the Lord! He for us! He in our stead!”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, 368]

A Cry For Rescue

“It simply came about that the familiar situation of the minister on Saturday at his desk and on Sunday in his pulpit crystallized in my case into a marginal note to all theology, which finally assumed the voluminous form of a complete commentary upon the Epistle to the Romans … What else can theology be but the truest possible expression of this quest and questioning on the part of the minister, the description of this embarrassment into which a man falls when he ventures upon this task and out of which he cannot find his way – a cry for rescue arising from great need and great hope?”

[Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, 110]

Excluding Any Faith of Man in Himself

“It is a decisive mark of what the Bible calls faith that everything stated about man as such, and about his bearing and circumstances, appears absolutely as the determination of his orientation to God as an object and therefore as the determination of his knowledge. Biblical faith excludes any faith of man in himself—that is, any desire for religious self-help, any religious self-satisfaction, any religious self-sufficiency. Biblical faith lives upon the objectivity of God. In one way or another, God comes into the picture, the sphere, the field of man’s consideration and conception in exactly the same way that objects do, uniting Himself to man, distinguishing Himself from him, evoking by His existence and nature man’s love, trust and obedience; but before and in and above all this, bearing witness to Himself by establishing from His side this orientation of man, this uniting and distinguishing. Biblical faith stands or falls with the fact that it is faith in God.”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 14]

Dear N.N., Many thanks for your kind letter. But what an obstinate fellow you are! You write that you were very impressed with what I told you last week in the Theological School. And now you manage to put down on paper all that nonsense about the kingdom of God that we must build. Dear N.N., in so doing you do not contradict merely one ‘insight’ but the whole message of the Bible. If you persist in this idea I can only advise you to take up any other career than that of a pastor.
» Karl Barth

Genuine Questions of Church Proclamation

“Just as the reality of the Word of God in Jesus Christ bears its possibility within itself, as does also the reality of the Holy Spirit, by whom the Word of God comes to man, so too the possibility of the knowledge of God and therefore the knowability of God cannot be questioned in vacuo, or by means of a general criterion of knowledge delimiting the knowledge of God from without, but only from within this real knowledge itself. Therefore it is quite impossible to ask whether God is knowable, because this question is already decided by the only legitimate and meaningful questioning which arises in this connexion. 

The only legitimate and meaningful questions in this context are: how far is God known? and how far is God knowable? These questions are legitimate and meaningful because they are genuine questions of Church proclamation, and therefore also genuine questions of dogmatics—genuine objects of its formal and material task.”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 6]

Happy Little Hyphens

“The concept of revelation and that of reason, history or humanity were usually linked by the copulative particle ‘and’, and the most superficial provisos were regarded as sufficient protection against all the possible dangers of such combinations. Happy little hyphens were used between, say, the words ‘modern’ and ‘positive,’ or ‘religious’ and ‘social,’ or ‘German’ and ‘Evangelical,’ as if the meaning then became self-evident. The fact was overlooked that all this pointed to the presence of a trojan horse within which the superior enemy was already drawn into the city. For in the long run the fundamentally peaceful acknowledgment of the combination came to be accepted as the true orthodoxy, as the basis of theology.”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 173—not that I think he is right about Kuyper and the ‘conservative’ version of revelation]

Free In the Same Sense

“The source of theology (which can also be called Gospel) is also its subject-matter, to which it is tied just as all other branches of knowledge pursued at the university are tied to their subject-matter. Without it theology could and would dissolve into amateurish excursions into history, philosophy, psychology, and so on…Bound to its subject matter though it is in this way, it enjoys complete freedom of inquiry and doctrine…and it accepts no instructions or regulations from anyone; it even serves the Church in the independence of its own responsibility. and since the God from whom it takes its name is no dictator, it cannot behave dictatorially. Bound only to his subject-matter, but also liberated by it, the teacher of theology can have and desires to have only pupils who are free in the same sense.”

[Karl Barth, Fragments Grave and Gay, 23]

A Well-Intentioned Business

“Do you understand what monotheism in the Christian faith means? God knows, not the number ‘one,’ but with this subject in His sheer uniqueness and otherness over against all others, different from all the ridiculous deities whom man invents. Once we have realized this, we can only laugh, and there is a laugh running through the Bible at these figures. Once the true God has been seen, the gods collapse into dust, and He remains the only One. ‘I am the Lord thy God…thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ This ‘thou shalt not’ has the force of ‘thou canst not.’ He who calls himself god alongside Him becomes the mere shadow of man’s extravagant longing, which has ill results.

And the Second commandment also becomes quite clear then: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image nor any sort of likeness. Thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them.’ that too is not a sign of Israelite ways of thinking and there is no philosophical concept of invisibility in the background. But God has Himself done everything in order to present Himself. How should man make an image of Him after He has presented His likeness Himself? A well-intentioned business, this entire ‘spectacle’ of Christian art, well-intentioned but impotent, since God Himself has made His own image. Once a man has understood ‘God in the highest’, it becomes impossible for him to want any imagery in thought, or any other kind of imagery.”

[Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 40 - 41 (not sure I agree with the extreme conclusion, though)]

Secretly Surrounded in All Lowliness

“The truth of Jesus Christ is not one truth among others; it is the truth, the universal truth that creates all truth as surely as it is the truth of God. For in Jesus Christ God has created all things, He has created all of us. We exist not apart from Him, but in Him, whether we are aware of it or not; and the whole cosmos exists not apaprt from him, but in Him, borne by Him, the Almighty Word. To know Him is to know all. To be touched and gripped by the Spirit in his realm means being led into all truth.

If a man believes and knows God, he can no longer ask, What is the meaning of my life? But by believing he actually lives the meaning of his life, the meaning of his creatureliness, of his individuality, in the limits of his creatureliness and individuality and in the fallibility of his existence, in the sin in which he is involved and of which daily and hourly he is guilty; yet he also lives it with the aid which is daily and hourly imparted to him through God’s interceding for him, in spite of him and without his deserving it. He recognises the task assigned to him in this whole, and the hope vouchsafed to him in and with this task, because of the grace by which he may live and the praise of the glory promised him, by which he is even here and now secretly surrounded in all lowliness.

The believer confesses this meaning of his existence. The Christian Creed speaks of God as the ground and goal of all that exists. The ground and goal of the entire cosmos means Jesus Christ. And the unheard-of thing may and must be said, that where Christian faith exists, there also exists, through God’s being trusted, inmost familiarity with the ground and goal of all that happens, of all things; there man lives, in spite of all that is said to the contrary, in the peace that passeth all understanding, and which for that very reason is the light that lightens our understanding.”

[Crikey. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 26–27]