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)
Tags: Church Dogmatics, Justification, Karl Barth, Sanctification
