The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation. Karl Barth
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necessarily the history of the loss of his own glory. The way of man, however, as the way in which God goes with him is the history of Jesus Christ, i.e. the history of the victory in which God proves His glory even in the Fall of man and is therefore necessarily the history of the restoration of man’s glory also.
2. By revealing Himself to man in Jesus Christ, God brings against man the accusation that his own way is the way of ingratitude towards God’s grace. Man, unfaithful to his calling, which is to serve God’s glory, makes himself the lord of his life, as if he were God. What he does thereby, he would have to be, without prospect of deliverance, if God withdrew His hand from him, viz. deprived of his own glory, i.e. a prisoner to the contradiction of his own nature, lost in a world which has ceased to have a lord and therefore ceased to have a meaning for him and subject to vanity. Man’s own way is the way of sin, i.e. of offence against God, which only God can make amends for.
3. By revealing Himself to man in Jesus Christ, God gives him the promise and commands him to believe, that it is He, God Himself, who makes amends for the evil done by man. This, man’s own way, is also the way in which God goes with him by becoming man in Jesus Christ. It is the way in which He confers on him the new unmerited glory of calling him His child, a glory which cannot be destroyed by any debt or punishment.
4. A pessimistic anthropology has nothing to do with that accusation and an optimistic anthropology has nothing to do with that promise. It is the Holy Spirit of God Himself who humiliates man as sinner, exalts him as believer and who enables him to be recognised in this humiliation and exaltation.
LECTURE VI
(Art. 4–6)
THE REVELATION OF GOD IN JESUS CHRIST
1. The revelation of God in Jesus Christ is the history of God’s faithfulness in the midst of man’s unfaithfulness and is therefore the history of the way of the grace of God with sinful man. In the testimony of the Old Testament the revelation of God is the history of the church which lives by the promise of Jesus Christ. In the testimony of the New Testament it is the history of Jesus Christ Himself. This twofold and inseparable history is at once the source and the subject of the Reformed teaching.
2. To instruct the church about herself, the revelation of God is borne witness to in the Old Testament as the history of a people, which, as a sinful people, has been elected and called, sustained and increased, blessed and led by God. Although it does not possess more than the promise and the command to have faith and although it ends its history in confirming man’s unfaithfulness by the rejection of Jesus Christ, nevertheless by its existence it testifies to the fact that the promise given to it has a ground and the faith commanded it has an object.
3. To instruct the church about her Lord and Saviour, the revelation of God is borne witness to in the New Testament as the history of Jesus Christ, Who as true Son of God has assumed true manhood and Who, rejected by men but confirming God’s faithfulness, has thereby reconciled sinful man with God in His own person. In the humiliation of His divine nature and in the exaltation of His human nature He is the goal, the significance and the content of the history of that people, the ground of its promise and the object of its faith, the ruling head of its church.
4. The historical and critical study of the Bible performs the task of understanding the human documents of the Old Testament and the New Testament as human documents. The question as to their divine content is not a question for critical study as such, but is the question with which faith has to do and is perhaps also the one with which superstition, error and unbelief are concerned.
LECTURE VII
(Art. 7–8)
GOD’S DECISION AND MAN’S ELECTION
1. Jesus Christ in His unity as true God and true man is the eternal, merciful decision of the just God for fellowship with sinful man and thereby the eternal, merciful election of sinful man for fellowship with the just God—a decision and election consummated in time.
2. Jesus Christ is God’s decision for man. It is free mercy that God decides for man and not against him. But that which for us is mercy is strict justice in the case of Jesus Christ, because He is the true God and because God in His human life and death has Himself taken our place and therefore finds His perfection again in the active obedience of this man and so is in pure fellowship with Him.
3. Jesus Christ is man’s election for God. It is free mercy that man is permitted to live with God and is not compelled to perish without Him. But that which for us is mercy is strict justice in the case of Jesus Christ, because He is true man and because God in His human life and death has Himself taken our place and therefore finds our guilt atoned for in the suffering and obedience of this man and so is in pure fellowship with Him.
4. God’s decision and man’s election is not a general truth (either in the sense of a hidden divine decree or in the sense of a quality of discernment belonging to man). It is exclusively the truth of the God-man Jesus Christ which is described above and which can be grasped in faith.
LECTURE VIII
(Art. 9–10)
GOD’S WORK AND MAN’S SALVATION
1. The salvation of man is his translation out of sin into righteousness before God and out of death into the fullness of life with God. This translation is not his own work but that of God. And this work of God is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the epitome of the Incarnation of the Son of God.
2. Jesus Christ the crucified is God in His humiliation, i.e. in His self-sacrifice—in His participation in the curse, the plight and the despair of the existence of sinful man. In this, however, He does not cease to be true God, but He takes—and this is the mystery of the Cross—the sin, guilt and punishment of man away from him and upon Himself. For His sake (in Him alone and in Him once and for all) sin is forgiven us for time and eternity.
3. Jesus Christ the risen is man in His exaltation, i.e. in His being raised up and transfigured through the power of God, in His participation in God’s majesty. In this, however, he does not cease to be true man but He realises—and this is the mystery of the Resurrection—a life of man in eternal righteousness, innocence and blessedness. For His sake (in Him alone and in Him once and for all) this righteousness is ascribed to us for time and eternity.
4. Because the salvation of man through God’s humiliation and man’s exaltation is not our own but God’s work, the work of Jesus Christ both crucified and risen, therefore the salvation of man can be brought about neither through the acts of a cult nor through the endeavours of a morality but can only be received through faith.
LECTURE IX
(Art. 11)
THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN THE FUTURE AND THE PRESENT LIFE OF MAN
1. The Kingdom of God is the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, because the power of God, as the one single and real power over all men and over the whole world, is the power of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.
2. In faith in Jesus Christ, i.e. in gratitude for the salvation which He has brought about and in recognition of His divine power, man is permitted to understand his existence anew as divine grace and favour. With this hidden yet real change Jesus Christ has become the Lord of man’s future also. But man’s present life has become a waiting for Jesus Christ as for Him who will make manifest this change.
3. Jesus Christ as the coming and expected one will execute the last judgement over men, in so far as He will unveil and judge the life lived in faith in Him as the eternally holy and the eternally blessed life in God’s light, but will unveil and judge all man’s work for salvation as remaining in sin and therefore as remaining in the darkness of eternal death.
4. The coming of Jesus Christ in judgement determines man’s present life as the expectation of faith which has nothing to fear except that it might become unbelief, error or superstition. And it has not even to fear this, in so far as it does not live by itself but by the power of Jesus Christ and by the salvation of man already brought about in Jesus Christ.
LECTURE