bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 9:43 am
"In eternity when we see God face to face, either we will be those who love, or we will not be"
"Wherever the Christian life in commission or omission is good before God, the good thing about it is love"
"the Holy Spirit is the love of the Father for the Son, & the love of the Son for the Father, & it is this Spirit who is given to us"
"Not every man is in fact what it is decisive to be: Israel elect & loved of God... whose Head is Jesus Christ"
"If no one can hear without being a child of God, no one can be a child of God without ever hearing anew"
"Love to God consists decisively in recognising that we have nothing of our own to offer Him"
"Being loved by Him, and having Him as our Lord, we have no future apart from Him, and therefore no future without love"
"Thou shalt love can only mean: thou shalt not try to evade or escape thy future as opposed to thy present"
"where there is no otherness of the one who is loved, where the one who loves is alone, he does not really love"
"Our self-love can never be anything right or holy & acceptable to God. It is an affection which is the very opposite of love"
"The man who loves God will let himself be told & will himself confess that he is not in any sense righteous as one who loves"
"H.F. Kohlbrügge: the more the love of God increases in the heart, the more knowledge there is of inability... of unwillingness"
the sorrowful marks of the love of God in the children of God: http://goo.gl/2J9Fd
seeking & finding; finding & distancing : http://goo.gl/xzDks
"[Mt 5:48] is not a law which crushes & kills... it is the promise & form of the Gospel in the Law... news, glad & comforting"
feeling smugly superior reading barth on not making "certain anthropologico-theological presuppositions which are quite illegitimate"
"Love to God is the quintessence & hypostasised expression of what we know in a concretely perceptible & practical form as love to man"
"the commandment of love to the neighbour is enclosed by that of love to God. it is contained in it"
"we cannot understand the 'thou shalt' apart from the promise 'thou wilt'"
"if it is a real miracle that we can love God, it is necessarily a real miracle that we can love our neighbour"
on Luke 10:29 "this is a point at which Calvin's exegesis is obviously wide of the mark." obviously!
barth & the social gospel: http://goo.gl/VrW9o
"for it is this actual misery of man, the curse of an attempt to live which is fore-doomed to failure..."
"but this neighbor will cause me a really mortal headache" http://goo.gl/3tlVt
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 9:22 am
"Christians are sinners and... the Church is a Church of sinners... justified sinners... sanctified sinners"
"revelation is the removal of all religion"
"work is faith & faith is work"
"All things considered, the Christian life, the life of the children of God, consists in these two concepts of love & praise"
"The Christian life begins with love. It also ends with love. If we did not begin to love, we would not have come to faith"
"As Christians, we are continually asked about love, and in all that we can ever do or not do, it is the decisive question"
my true neighbor
Barth, CD I/2, p. 430-431:
The fellow-man who is unaware of his true plight, the fellow-man to whom we can look and about whom we can concern ourselves, above all the fellow-man who helps us confirm and enhance us in the role of benefactor, mentor and ameliorator: this fellow-man does not constitute any serious problem, and any headaches which he may incidentally cause will not be mortal. But this in the last resort not at all disconcerting fellow-man is not our neighbour in the sense of the second commandment. He is not the one who, sent and authorised by God, shows mercy upon us. He is lacking in the most important quality, in which alone he could do so, an actual similarity to the crucified Jesus Christ. At least, he is so in our eyes and in his relation to us. That is why he is not at all disconcerting. That is why we do not experience any serious unwillingness in relation to him. But that is also why he cannot help us seriously. This fellow-man will not summon us to the praise of God. Only afflicted, sinful fellow-man can do that. Only this man is my neighbour in the sense of the second commandment. But this neighbour will cause me a really mortal headache. I mean, he will seriously give me cause involuntarily to repudiate his existence and in that way to put myself in serious danger. In face of this neighbour I certainly have to admit to myself that I would really prefer to exist in some other way than in this co-existence. I would prefer this because from this neighbour a shadow falls inexorably and devastatingly upon myself. The wretched fellow-man beside me simply reveals to me in his existence my own misery. For can I see him in the futility and impotence of his attempt to live, without at once mutatis mutandis recognising myself? If I really see him, if as propinquissimus he is brought into such close contact with me that, unconfused by any intersecting feelings which may influence me, I can only see his misery, how can it be otherwise? This is the criterion: if it is otherwise, if I can still see him without seeing myself, then for all the direct sympathy I may have for him, for all the zeal and sacrifice I may perhaps offer him, I have not really seen him. He remains at root that in no way disconcerting fellow-man. He is still not my neighbour. The neighbour shows me that I myself am a sinner.
This passage, which really needs its greater context to fully explain itself, is so characteristic of Barth's style, at least to the extent I've read him so far.
It's a strange new world...
This bit of Barth, it seems to me, has something to say to the question of why short-term missions are taking off, while local dying neighborhoods continue to experience neglect.
barth & the social gospel
After some beautiful work on the neighbor in the parable, Barth considers the question of our responsibility to one who is "in great suffering and therefore in need of help, a fellow-man whom we have to love by bringing the help which he needs." CD I/2, p.427-428:
If we are to keep strictly to the biblical witness to revelation we cannot answer this question with a doctrine which is roughly as follows: That suffering fellow-man in need of help directs the children of God to the task which God has appointed for them. God does not will the many griefs and sufferings and burdens under which we men have to sigh. He wills their removal. He wills a better world. Therefore, we, too, should will this better world, and a true worship of God consists in our cooperation in the removal of these sufferings. Therefore our neighbour in his distress is a reminder to us and the occasion and object of our proper worship of God.This kind of ("religio-social") teaching overlooks too many things and arbitrarily introduces too many things for us to be able to accept it. That God does not will the evil under which we men have to suffer is true to the extent, but only to the extent, that as His revelation shows, He does not will its cause, the alienation of man from Himself, and the world as fashioned by this alienation, which as such is necessarily a world full of evil. On the contrary, in drawing man to Himself in Jesus Christ, he inaugurates a new world and causes it to break through. This work of reconciliation, in the consummation to which Jesus Christ pointed and which He is to fulfil, is the divine removing of the things under which we now see both ourselves and others suffer. We are not told that we have to cooperate in this removing as such. We are not told that we have to undertake the amelioration of the world in fulfilment of a divine programme of amelioration. We are not told that we shall find a neighbour in our fellow-man because his pitiable condition stirs us to do something along these lines. What we are told is that we should love our neighbour by proclaiming to him - not only in word, of course, but in deed - the true amelioration and therefore Jesus Christ.
Our neighbour in the sense of that doctrine of world-amelioration would again mean Law (instead of Gospel first and then as such Law). This is the very perversion which our previous discussion has shown to be untenable. Even our suffering fellow-man in need of help does not primarily confront us with a task.
Seriously?
Sounds to me like a distinction without a difference, which is itself undermined by how he himself qualifies his assertion ("not only in word, of course, but in deed").
Looking forward to how he sorts this out in his continuing & developing thought.
seeking & finding
Barth, CD I/2, p.393:
Often enough we can see in others, and especially in ourselves, that it is possible to be a regular and genuine and serious seeker after God, out of a passionately sincere heart, or a real sense and experience of the many compulsions of life and conscience - only to give it all up when our apparent seriousness is suddenly taken seriously, in a situation in which our seeking could really be a finding... and simply because the God we find, who has let himself be found, is not the One of whom we can joyfully confess that it is Him we have sought. We love Him or think that we love Him at a distance, but we do not love Him near at hand. We prefer to withdraw to that pretended love at a distance. But is not that love unmasked and adjudged as non-love?