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