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.
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]
Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriously; and if we have faith as a grain of mustard seed, that suffices for the devil to have lost his game.
‘Credo In’ Means that I Am Not Alone
“It is noteworthy that, apart from this first expression ‘I believe,’ the Confession is silent upon the subjective fact of faith. Nor was it a a good time when this relationship was reversed, when Christians grew eloquent over their action, over the uplift and emotion of the experience of this thing, which took place in man, and when they became speechless as to what we may believe. By the silence of the Confession on the subjective side, by its speaking only of the objective Creed, it also speaks at its best, deepest and completest about what happens to us men, about what we may be, do, and experience. Here too it is true that whoso would keep his life shall lose it; but whoso shall lose it for My sake shall gain his life. Who so means to rescue and preserve the subjective element shall lose it; but whoso gives it up for the sake of the objective, shall save it. I believe—of course! It is my, it is a human, experience and action, that is, a human form of existence.
But this ‘I believe’ is consummated in a meeting with One who is not man, but God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and by my believing I see myself completely filled and determined by this object of my faith. And what interests me is not myself with my faith, but He in whom I believe. And then I learn that by thinking of Him and looking to Him, my interests are also best provided for. I believe in, credo in, means that I am not alone.”
[Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 16]
As a Theologian One Can Never Be Great
“With horror I read [a] statement that I was the greatest theologian of the century. That really terrified me…. What does the term ‘greatest theologian’ actually mean? … As a theologian one can never be great, but at best one remains small in one’s own way…. Let me again remind you of the donkey I referred to [earlier]. A real donkey is mentioned in the Bible, or more specifically an ass…. It was permitted to carry Jesus to Jerusalem. If I have done anything in this life of mine, I have done it as a relative of the donkey that went its way carrying an important burden. The disciples had said to its owner: ‘The Lord has need of it.’ And so it seems to have pleased God to have used me at this time, just as I was, in spite of all the things, the disagreeable things, that quite rightly are and will be said about me. Thus I was used…. I just happened to be on the spot. A theology somewhat different from the current theology was apparently needed in our time, and I was permitted to be the donkey that carried this better theology for part of the way, or tried to carry it as best I could.”
[Karl Barth, “Speech on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday Celebrations,” in Fragments Grave and Gay, 112]
Barçelona’s Church Dogmatics
The first time I read Karl Barth in seminary was in first year and, as expected of a very green but very excited young missionary-to-be, I dismissed him as overrated and unorthodox. Maybe it was the prior warnings of concerned pastors, maybe it was the difficulty of reading an excerpt out of context, maybe it was the 10 point type on the Xeroxed page: regardless, I shrugged off this man and his writings for another two years, trying to not concern myself with his meandering, confrontational writing that made complicated something that should be very simple. Couldn’t he just be like Berkhof and be a bit concise?
Two years later I found myself in an elective course called “The Theology of Karl Barth.” Three months of reading nothing but the guy who wrote a book 6 million words long.
Church Dogmatics, Barth intricately weaves his way through the faith of the Christian Church as one who is simultaneously a herald, an explorer, and a lover. You get no sense whatsoever that the things of which he writes make no difference to his life, nor that he does not want you to walk along side him as he travels the network of paths of dogmatics from Volume I/1 to IV/4.
Could he have said it all in two volumes? Yes and no. The content might have been covered in two books, but the sense of wonder and the sense of every point’s interrelation and necessity to the whole—the architecture of the thing—would be lost. It is precisely seeing that architecture, that spider web, little by little, then seeing its entirety that brings so much joy to the process of theology with Barth.
Despite the latter’s more orthodox theology, walking through Church Dogmatics is on a different emotional plane than the suburban street that is Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology.
I happily count Karl Barth as one of my heroes, a vivid example of the passion and joy that a Christian theologian should have and should spread as he goes about his task.
My experience of the World’s Greatest Football Club has followed a very similar path. Even though I first discovered European soccer around 1997 in my college (and chose Liverpool as my side according to some very ridiculous standards that will remain unsaid; let’s just say I was reading a lot of Joyce in those days), I failed to see the beauty that many folks associated with Barcelona. Even circa 2004, against my more knowledgable friend in Albuquerque, I rooted against them in favor of Real Madrid and others. Like Karl Barth, their style and success simply did not affect me.
But now. Now, in 2011, I have eyes to see. Barcelona, especially under Pep Guardiola, have been writing their own Church Dogmatics for the past three seasons. Barca’s acheivement is beautiful not mainly because of their tiki-taka style of play, but because their mastery and joy and skill in their play is evident and winsome. The Grudems and the cold-Wednesday-nights-at-Stoke of the world have their place, and even their certain pragmatic beauty. The ways in which Chelsea and Real Madrid play have their attractions and even advantages over Barcelona’s way, just as Piper’s corpus has its distinct advantages over Barth’s magnum opus. Yet the long gestation of Barca’s current form, what Jonathan Wilson has called “habit football,” has given their game a feeling of finality and comprehensiveness that the others lack. They have played so long with one another that their sense of space and movement of all the other players on the pitch is near to ESP, just as Barth is so saturated with Scripture and the Christian tradition that even his brief asides are profound.
Like the Dogmatics, many view Barca’s passing as so much boredom-inducing indulgence from the artist: it is not knowing when to shut up. How many different ways do we need to say, “God reveals Himself”? It is the repetition, the slight variation, that drives home and affects the spirit, not just the mind, of the reader. Barcelona have averaged 747 passses per match in their league matches this season, 200 more than any other side in Europe. They cover the same ground with those passes over and over again, networking the whole together, saying the same thing again and again. Xavi, Iniesta, and Messi may repeat themselves hundreds of times over a season, but those repetitions give rise to truly breathtaking and innovative moves that we are all better for witnessing.
Others have written far more eloquently of what makes Barcelona so successful, so fun to watch. For me, watching not just a single match, but an entire season like this one has given so much pleasure in the midst of a personally very difficult year. It is the intricate coherence of the whole, not just a singular run by Messi through five Real Madrid defenders, that creates the sense of awe, yes, but mainly a desire to be a part of that great story. The idea that a 33-year-old desk jockey could be a participant in something as incredible as the 5–0 carving of Real in November’s Clasico—the near-perfect partnership of me and ten other men to create something like that—is, of course, preposterous. But that is exactly the point.
I will never write a Church Dogmatics. I don’t agree with everything in the 13 volumes. Barth had his failures, his errors, his curmudgeonliness with opponents (especially with “evangelicals” like Cornelius Van Til). But nothing has made me want to do a great thing in constructive theology as Barth’s Dogmatics has.
And so it is with Barcelona. I loathe their play-acting, Busquets’ nasty mouth, their hounding of officials to almost no end. Yet, no side, indeed no sports team at all, has made me want to deeply enjoy and attempt to emulate their play as much as Barca. No one soccer team or theologian will or should affect every person in the same way, but I am grateful and happy to have found these two and the deep joy that comes along with them.
