Done!

Just finished the last page of Barth’s Church Dogmatics!

I’m starting summer Greek soon, so I probably won’t be posting often, but I will try to post more than I have these past three months. Stay tuned!

Filed under: Karl Barth , Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth

Barth on The Church’s Solidarity With the World

Here’s another quote from Barth. Here he talks about the Church’s solidarity with the world  as an implication of her existence for God (which necessarily follows from God’s being for the world):

Solidarity with the world means that those who are genuinely pious approach the children of the world as such, that those who are genuinely righteous are not ashamed to sit down with the unrighteous as friends, that those who are genuinely wise do not hesitate to seem to be fools among fools, and that those who are genuinely holy are not too good or irreproachable to go down “into hell” in a very secular fashion. (CD, IV.3.2, 774.)

Filed under: Ecclesiology, Karl Barth, Quotes , Ecclesiology, Karl Barth

“All this I did for thee; What wilt thou do for me?”: The Wrong Way to View Sanctification

Here’s an excellent quote from Barth on his section on sanctification. It’s not uncommon to see preachers guilting their congregants into “obedience,” and then wrongly calling the resulting work sanctification. Obedience that does not flow from faith in Jesus Christ (not an abstract ideal which can be replaced, but the concrete  Jesus Christ who is the incarnate Son of God) is neither true nor acceptable obedience before God:

. . . Far too often the matter has been conceived and represented as though His humiliation to death for our justification by Him as our Representative were His own act, but our exaltation to fellowship with God as the corresponding counter-movement, and therefore our sanctification, were left to us, to be accomplished by us. “All this I did for thee; What wilt thou do for me?” The New Testament does not speak this way. It knows nothing of a Jesus who lived and died for the forgiveness of our sins, to free us as it were retrospectively, but who now waits as though with tied arms for us to act in accordance with the freedom achieved for us. It is natural that He should be thought of in this way when it is overlooked and forgotten that He is not only the suffering Son of God but also the victorious and triumphant Son of Man. He is this, too, in our place and favour. (CD, IV. 2 p 516)

Filed under: Karl Barth, Quotes, Reformed Theology , Church Dogmatics, Justification, Karl Barth, Sanctification

Pleading Faith Rather Than Christ

Here’s a nice quote from Barth on man’s sanctification. It’s easy to forget that both sanctification and justification consist in our looking away from ourselves and looking outward to Jesus Christ. As soon as our gaze is taken off of Christ and placed on ourselves we will either end up as ‘pharisaic publicans’ (as Barth likes to put it) or we will end up wallowing in Bunyan’s ’slough of despond’:

As a being and work liberated from the unrighteousness of the old man and filled with the righteousness of the new he [believing man] cannot plead before Him his faith–let alone anything else. And remarkably enough, the more sincere and deep our faith actually is, the less we will find in our faith as in all our other being and activity, the more strange and impossible will be the thought that we can please God with this one work of faith, the more we will try to cling to the fact that we have died as the old man in Jesus Christ, and that we are created and alive as a new man in Jesus Christ, and that we have not to produce our own confirmation of this righteousness before God in our life and being, not our own Christian righteousness, not our own righteousness of faith as a product and achievement and state of our own heart and mind in which we can lay hold of the truth and power of the divine verdict. In faith the Christian will find himself justified because believing in this divine sentence fulfilled and revealed in Jesus Christ he dashes himself against the rock of that work of God which God has willed and done, certainly on behalf of man, but primarily for His own sake, to assert His honour and to maintain His glory against him. (CD, IV. 1 p 97-8)

Filed under: Karl Barth, Quotes , Church Dogmatics, Justification, Karl Barth, Sanctification