A Weblog Dedicated to the Discussion of the Christian Faith and 21st Century Life

A Weblog Dedicated to the Discussion of the Christian Faith and 21st Century Life
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I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, –that unless I believed, I should not understand.-- St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Trinity Tuesday: The One Who Says "God" By Necessity Must Also Say "Jesus Christ"


Holy Scripture describes a work, and first the work of Creation. Alongside himself God puts something else, something different from Himself-- namely, the creature, without having need of it, in the power of His Almightiness, in His holy, overflowing love. Secondly, a covenant is set up between God and one of His creatures, between God and man. Once more an inconceivable fact: why precisely between God and man, of whom from the beginning it is narrated that he is unfaithful to God, that he is a sinner? In spite of this sin, sovereignly overlooking it, reserving for Himself its amendment, God surrenders Himself. He lends Himself to become the God of a tiny, despised people in Asia Minor, Israel. He lends himself to become a member of this people, a little child, and then to die. And thirdly-- but the whole thing is one-- there is the work of redemption, the unveiling of the purpose of God's free love for man and the world, the annihilation of all that would hinder this purpose; there is the revelation and the manifestation of the new heaven and the new earth. All this is a way, under the sign of the name of Jesus Christ, the man Jesus Christ, in whom God himself has become visible and active on earth, who is at once the goal of the history of the nation Israel, and the beginning and starting-point of the Church, and at the same time the revelation of the redemption, of the completion, of the whole. The whole work of God lives and moves in this one Person. He who says God in the sense of Holy Scripture will necessarily have to say Jesus Christ over and over again.
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Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, p. 39.

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