One can hardly imagine that such a spirit could make any serious contribution to the understanding of the Christian gospel. Thus, in this case he offers no more than an anthropological account of moral life. It means taking in the beauty of the world and becoming thoroughly imbued with its spirit.
This emphasis on the corporate nature of the Christian life is one of his best contributions. Yet, as in a faulty broadcast, the counterargument of the philosopher can be heard in the background. The Kingdom of God, stripped of the eschatological transcendence that belongs to it in the.
Therefore he turned his generation back to the New Testament, read in the light of the Reformation. The reasoning, as he says, "is primarily related to the entire religious community." It is in the company of believers that a man enters into a personal relationship.
What he insists on is "the blessedness of the thought that we are always wrong in relation to God. Men saw the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
THE THEOLOGY OF PARADOX CCH. VII
The true Christian is a martyr, not necessarily by a violent death or because he pursues misery, but because in a society like ours he is made into the outlier of the world. The assumption underlying everything is that you are members of the Church, just as you are citizens, and that you are both born. Instead of the “comforted despair” in which Luther found the essence of the Christian life, the Church as she is breeds a mood of naive compassion.
After two generations of comparative neglect, his name is once again on people's lips, while his uncompromising toughness and drive have been eagerly awaited, as it were with cries of relief, by many for whom a milder version and the idyllic Gospel had become repulsive. An age of flat and craven rationalism must be jolted awake; in the circumstances of the hour, there was no room for timid impartiality; the crisis demanded didactic hyperbole, which with its sharp blade penetrated to the vitals. Therefore, not that he nicely strikes the balance between God and man, transcendence and immanence, the Gospel and the culture of the age.
In an important passage he once admitted that his view of the Gospel had little to offer the child. The conclusion is inevitable that Kierkegaard, in his efforts to change the balance of contemporary religious thought, is introducing new distortions of faith so violent and perverse that they threaten our grasp of the New Testament concept of God and of the lives of His children. seriously endanger. called to lead. Previously, he had clearly recognized that the religious life of the individual is threatened by society only when society is contaminated, and not by society as a family or community of God, i.e.
It must be admitted that we are all tempted, in our moments of exasperation, to think with indignant contempt of the fellowship which God has given us within His Church; and the temptation to this sin is one from which Kierkegaard has not entirely escaped. He knew that, God was in Christ, he traced the directions of evidence throughout his career; but he failed to detect any broad movement of divine purpose that runs through the generations. On a review of all the evidence, we are justified, I think, in concluding that two conceptions of God (in terms of the Christian's relationship to God) were at war within his separate conceptions of mind, which is impossible to reconcile, not simply because the Problem of combining them defeats us for the moment, but because we clearly see that they cannot be combined.
Of course, for God and man, thus defined, there can be no possibility of union or communion of the kind known as personal communion, and this not merely by virtue of what man is, but certainly by virtue of what. It is argued that the influence of God, revealed in Scripture as a purely transcendent being, must act upon us like the all-consuming heat of the tropical sun when it burns and kills vegetation. It is unnecessary to dwell on the fact that, in choosing the latter mode of interpretation, which Kierkegaard was not infrequently tempted to regard as the nobler of the two, W C.
VIII
Accordingly, Barth's thought is now given the name, and the much better one, "Theology of the Word of God." His Word is testified in the Bible in the word of the prophets and apostles, which was originally and once for all spoken to them by God's revelation. Dogmatics, like confession or creed itself, is the human recognition of the reality of God in His revelation.
In short, it is a clarifying expansion of the confession in the sense of the Holy Scriptures. Thoughts that are mundane, worldly, absorbed by "here" to the exclusion of "the other," are theology in name only. Primarily and originally it is the Word "which God speaks now and then to himself in eternal secret"; 1 a truth which is developed in the doctrine of the Trinity, for Jesus Christ is the word of God from all eternity.
Because as far as preaching really rests on the memory of the revelation that testifies in the Bible and is therefore the obedient repetition of the biblical testimony, it is no less the Word of God than the Bible. The one way to escape from a doctrinaire and static view of the Word of God is to remember at every point that the Word is Jesus Christ. The Word of God in its revelation - its content, is God's turn towards man." l No systematic or logical overview of the two is possible.
Space fails us here to develop Barth's fully articulated doctrine of the Triune being of God. God in Himself is the Love that in the mystery and miracle of the "new birth" becomes visible to us. The presence of the Creator of the world, His presence in the world unknown to the world - this is the key to understanding history.
In the Resurrection, the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but in a transcendent way. The highest expression of the totalitarian alter revealed in the Bible [he writes] is the preaching of the forgiveness of sins. This, and this alone, ends the attempt to build the Christian life on ideals, instead of God's forgiveness.
0 5. THE CHURCH
For Barth, the study of the Christian life in obedience is thus not another chapter that supplements the one that spoke of reconciliation, election, faith and hope; it is still the same unqualified attack on the natural man, the same attitude of complete dependence on God. The one thing WC must not do with this is to interpret it as if it were spoken by someone sitting in the scoffer's seat. He himself is deeply and sadly involved in the imperfections of the Church and utters a brotherly warning.
It is true, he writes with one-sided dogmatism: “The work of the Church is the work of men; it can never be God's work', 1 but this somewhat noisy emphasis is certainly not his last word. If she does not know the meaning of repentance, she cannot be the Church of God. We should then see clearly that 'viewed from the invisible standpoint of God, the working of the Gospel of Christ cannot be distinguished from the working of the Church'.2 We should then feel free to say: 'The Church is the place of fruitful and hopeful repentance; and it is nothing else.”.
Thus Barth's final estimate of the church has all the gravity and all the Reformation thought. For him, as for the greatest minds in the evangelical tradition, it is true that there is any salvation outside the Church. Barth's theology is eschatological through and through, but perhaps not in the commonly accepted sense of that word.1 As he has recently put it: “Eschatological does not mean what is not properly or truly meant, but what is related to &qazov, i.e. to that which to our sight, to our experience and thought, is still excellent, to the eternal reality of the divine fulfillment and execution." 2.
If these things are the case, theology is not eschatological by chance; on the contrary, all its thinking should be from the point of view of the End. Barth rightly declares that theology, which is worldly, secular, concerned with "here" to the exclusion of. Before we record some of the larger aspects of Barth's teaching which have been unleashed in the enrichment of the whole Church, I would like to direct attention to one or two matters which we may reasonably dispute.
By that I do not simply mean that, in its staples, his thoughts are profoundly biblical, and therefore unassailable; even if it is part of the truth. But it is never used to cover up the belief that there was once and for all a Divine creation of the world. Other topics on which we can look for further light are the following: the conception of the Church that lies behind Barth's recent dogmatic work.
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Paul and other apostles, extent of division between, Salvation, manner of arrival, 139 205; necessity for, Barth forward.
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