Word: barth
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Beginning with the words, "I believe. . .," Barth devotes three lectures to the subject of Faith. "Christian faith," he says, "is the illumination of reason in which men become free to live in the truth of Jesus Christ and thereby to become sure also of the meaning of their own existence and of the ground and goal of all that happens...
...according to Barth, "is He who according to Holy Scripture exists, lives, acts, makes Himself known to us in the work of His free love ..." But it is dangerous to think of God as nothing but unlimited power. "Perhaps you recall how, when Hitler used to speak about God, he called Him 'the Almighty.' . . . Holy Scripture never speaks of God's power, its manifestations and its victories, in separation from the concept of law." This law is to be found in God as Father-"the God who is in Himself love...
Behind God's Back. The idea of God as Creator, says Barth, is not, as generally thought, an easily accepted article of the Creed on which "Christians, Jews and Gentiles, believers and unbelievers ... to some extent stand together." God as Creator is a mystery as difficult of comprehension as the belief that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin. "The existence of the creature alongside God is the great puzzle and miracle ... It is the genuine question about existence, which is essentially and fundamentally distinguished from the question which rests upon error...
Creation, writes Barth, is grace. All created things are kept from a state of nothingness only by God. But the "whole realm we term evil-death, sin, the Devil and hell-is not God's creation, but rather what was excluded by God's creation, that to which God has said 'No.' And if there is a reality of evil, it can only be the reality of this excluded and repudiated thing, the reality behind God's back, which He passed over when He made the world and made it good." Thus, evil is nothingness...
Fresh Spirit. The Church, says Barth, will die and petrify if it does not proclaim the Good News. Christians have been told to "Go out and preach the Gospel!" The injunction is not " 'Go and celebrate services!' 'Go and edify yourselves with the sermon!' 'Go and celebrate the Sacraments!' 'Go and present yourselves in a liturgy, which perhaps repeats the heavenly liturgy!' 'Go and devise a theology which may gloriously unfold like the Summa of St. Thomas!' Of course, there is nothing to forbid all this; there may exist very...