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.