Barth in a nutshell

Having spoken of Jesus Christ as God taking on flesh, even sinful flesh, even identifying himself with failed Israel and humanity, and suffering death on the cross, Barth says this..

"Who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine. And if He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ as the God who does this, it is not for us to be wiser than He and to say that it is in contradiction with the divine essence.... We may believe that God can and must only be absolute in contrast to all that is relative, exalted in contrast to all that is lowly, inviolable in contrast to all temptation, transcendent in contrast to all immanence, and therefore divine in contrast to everything human, in short that He can and must be "Wholly Other". But such beliefs are shown to be quite untenable, and corrupt and pagan, by the fact that God does in fact be and do this in Jesus Christ" Church Dogmatics IV.1 T&T Clark:London 2004. pp186

What is interesting in this whole section is Barth's concept of idolatry. The idols we make are not projections of who we are; broken, failing and weak, but of who we would like to be; strong, powerful independent. The scandal of the incarnation and cross is that God freely chooses to be more like us than we wish to be ourselves.

Which got me thinking about how we present God to those who don't believe.
I pulled out all my evangelistic courses, and basically all of them kicked off by saying that we know Jesus is God because he had power and authority. Now, to a certain extent that it true, and to a certain extent it is a scandal, as it challenges our modern conceptions of our own autonomy.
But imagine kicking off a Gospel presentation that argues that we know Jesus is God because he identified with a rebellious people, because his name was scorned by the nations, because he made himself vulnerable, because he died to save his people. Now that would be outrageous.That would be foolishness to the gentiles. That would be a confession that 'Jesus is Lord', rather than simply 'Lord is Lord', which, though it still calls us to follow the Lord, tells us nothing about the nature of his Lordship.




"Nein, ist dieses ich in kurzen Worten: „Hilfe! Ich bin in kurzen Worten! Wie kam ich in diese blutige große große Nuss-Schale? Welches ein bisschen Shell hat eine Mutter so?“