God on the brink?

In a long excursus on John 3:16 and 2 Corinthians 5:19, Barth twice refers to God risking his "own existence as God" in the work of Christ on the Cross. He continues

"It is his self-revelation and self-realisation (in and for the world) as a gift, and rebus sic stantibus that can mean only the offering of that without which he cannot be God, and therefore of the greatest possible danger for himself."

I'm still trying to make sense of this!! But it seems odd that Barth, having absolutely insisted on the total freedom in which God carries out his redeeming work should now present God as driven by some inner necessity towards an act of (potential) self-destruction.

Can God cease to exist? Is he just another thing which can flash out of existence and leave everything else intact? That doesn't seem right - God is just more than one more thing in the universe. Or, if he exists at all, is his existence necessary in the manner of Anselm's ontological argument?

Love and wrath.

"It is only of God that what man comes to experience in covenant with him is favour. It is not always so, not by a long way in all the supposed or actual experience of man. Even in his experience of what comes to him from God, man can be blind, or half blind, and can therefore make mistakes and can find terror and destruction in what God has allotted and given as supreme benefit. And necessarily the benefit offered him by God can in fact and objectively become terror and destruction if he flees from God and opposes him. Even the divine favour will then take on the aspect of wrath. God's Yes will then become a No and his grace judgement. The light itself will blind him and plunge him into darkness. Life will be to him death." p 41

The love of God .....

"The love of God begins in fear, and the fear of God ends in love; and that love can never end, for God is love." John Donne Sermons, vol 6. No.4

Isaiah 7

On page 5 of Vol 4 part 1, Barth has some interesting comments on Isaiah 7 - the whole section is headed "God with us", and of course that is the meaning of the name Emmanuel, the mysterious child of Isiaiah 7:14ff.

"What is important in the text is that when the child is born, that is in less than a year, he will be given the name Emmanuel, because God will have saved his people from the threat of Rezin and Pekah and they will be again rejoicing in his goodness. That is the one side of the sign; But the other is that before the child can distinguish between good and evil, a fgew years later, he will have to eat milk and honey, the food of the nomad..... "

THE time, THE place

"The time God has for us is constituted by his becoming present for us in Jesus Christ, ie Deus praesens. If we say Jesus Christ we also assert a human and therefore a temporal presence. ........ Revelation in the sense of Holy Scripture .... is an eternal, but not therefore a timeless, reality. It is also a temporal reality.
Revelation will never be discovered by anyone who undertakes to arrive at a kind of timeless core by abstracting from all times or from specific times, or who who attempts to rise from the human to the divine. It will never be discovered by one to whom its temporality is a worry, who thinks it his duty to pass by its temporality and interrogate and grasp its nature as something transcendently timeless. Revelation has its time, and only in and along with its time is it revelation. How otherwise can it be revelation to and for us, who are ourselves temporal to the core?" C.D. 1:2 page 50


And so the battle against misplaced abstraction goes on.

Down the mine .............

Reading through Barth is to discover a mine of quotations from other writers - the man appears to have read everything. Here are two from this morning's reading.

First Augustine:

"Non mediator homo praeter deitatem, non mediator Deus praeter humanitatem. Ecce mediator: divinitas sine humanitate non est mediatrix; humanitas sine divinitate non est mediatrix; sed inter divinitatem solam et humanitatem solam mediatrix est humana divinitas et divina humanitas Christi." (Sermo 47:12 2)

and then Martin Luther:

"Christ is the light of men through his humanity .... through which his divinity shines as through a mirror or a coloured glass, or as the sun through a light cloud; for the light is ascribed to the divinity, not the
humanity; yet the humanity is not despised, since it is there as the cloud and curtain of this light." (Pred. uber Jn 1:1ff.)

Principles!

"It was always a serious misinterpretation of the New Testament as well as of the Old Testament, to think of discovering its content (after the manner of all, legalism) in certain principles. It makes no difference
whether it was the principle of sonship to God, or perhaps the struggle of true religion with the church, or vice versa the principle of the Church as the place of the true transmission of salvation and adoration of God, or a definite moral principle (say that of action on conviction or that of unconditioned love) .... or the principle of this or that mystical or social theory and practice which was to be the preferred and presented as the essence of the matter ........ we would do well to realise that in the sense of the New Testament writers themselves,
literally everything they say would be but marginal and incidental and transient, if interpreted as the proclamation of a principle or idea or general truth - but that literally everything is central and fundamental
and eternal, the moment it is interpreted as the predicate in an utterance about Jesus Christ."

Church Dogmatics Vol. 1 The Doctrine of the Word of God. p.11

The current "principle" which holds us in thrall is "inclusiveness" - whenever you see an individual congregation or a denomination trying to sum up its approach, there is a very good chance that the word "inclusive" will appear somewhere. In many cases that will be code word meaning " we are very welcoming of homosexuals practicing or not". It might mean more properly, " we do not wish differences of race, age, sex, colour or social standing etc etc to prevent any one from hearing and being challenged by the gospel of Jesus Christ. " It is true that we can all come to God in Christ just as we are; but no-one is left unchallenged or unchanged by an authentic encounter with the living Christ. There are some parts of every life that God does NOT welcome.

Dairy of a black-sheep in summer!

You resident black sheep has some serious reading to do over the summer! The plan is to plough through as much of Karl Barth's "Church Dogmatics" as possible. The CD is possibly one of the greatest works of Reformed theology ever written and certainly one of the longest from the pen of an individual author. It's title, in English, combines two of the (currently) dirtiest words in the English language

Church: this summer we are witnessing the Anglican communion struggling not to blow itself to bits over homosexuality, not the most edifying spectacle even for those who know enough to understand why this is a necessary debate. From the outside the church looks like a strange body of people with distinctly odd views about sex, and otherwise uninteresting.

but it gets worse

Dogmatics: nobody wants to be thought dogmatic any more - the word is associated with the arrogance of those who "know it all" in fields where such clarity is considered at best impossible and at worst, at least in the UK, impolite. Religion is just such a field! Dogmatics actually means just "teachings" - and if the Church has nothing to teach it has nothing to say (apart from "sorry", which we often need to say). Church Dogmatics is an exploration of the teachings of the church across ten thousand pages.

Should be fun - watch this space!!

Jesus was ..........

Efforts by theologians and historians to plumb the mystery of Jesus continue unabated.
Summarised below for your edification and delight are some of the latest results of this research!


There are 3 good arguments that Jesus was Jewish:

1. 1.He went into his father's business.
2. 2. He lived at home until he was 33
3. 3. He was sure his Mother was a virgin and his Mother was sure He was God

But then there are 3 equally good arguments that Jesus was Italian:

1. 1. He talked with His hands
2. 2. He had wine with His meals
3. 3. He used olive oil

But then there are 3 equally good arguments that Jesus was a Californian:

1. 1. He never cut His hair
2. 2. He walked around barefoot all the time
3. 3. He started a new religion

But then there were 3 equally good arguments that Jesus was an American Indian:

1. 1. He was at peace with nature
2. 2. He ate a lot of fish
3. 3. He talked about the Great Spirit

But then there are 3 equally good arguments that Jesus was Irish:

1. 1. He never got married.
2. 2. He was always telling stories.
3. 3. He loved green pastures.

There are 3 good arguments that Jesus was Black:

1. 1. He called everyone brother
2. 2. He liked Gospel
3. 3 . He didn't get a fair trial

But the most compelling evidence of all - 3 proofs that Jesus was a woman:

1. 1. He fed a crowd at a moment's notice when there was virtually no food
2. 2. He kept trying to get a message across to a bunch of men who just didn't get it
3. 3. And even when He was dead, He had to get up because there was still work to do.

Someone said to me the other day "Isn't God as we find him in the Ten Commandments rather an inadequate personality? How does it go? Number 1 - You shall have no other gods but me. Number 2 No graven images. Number 3 No taking my name in vain. Doesn't that speak of a deity somewhat unsure of himself and his relationships?"

Is a wife who says to her husband "You shall have no other husband but me" inadequate? Or is she simply stating the terms of the relationship, terms not unreasonable given then nature of marriage? The Commandments are like that - the terms of a relationship between God and his people. What is more they are for our benefit and not God's. He doesn't need our worship, but we need nothing more desperately than to set our hearts on the one for whom our hearts were made. If we set our hearts on other things, worship other gods, the results are always disastrous.