It so happened that in this man Jesus God himself came into the world, which he had created and against all odds still loved. He took human nature upon himself and became man, like the rest of us, in order to put an end to the world’s fight against him and also against itself, and to replace man’s disorder by God’s design. In Jesus God hallowed his name, made his kingdom come, his will done on earth as it is in heaven, as we say in the Lord’s Prayer. In him he made manifest his glory and, amazingly enough, he made it manifest for our salvation. To accomplish this, he not only bandaged, but healed the wounds of the world he helped mankind not only in part and temporarily but radically and for good in the person of his beloved Son; he delivered us from evil and took us to his heart as his children Thereby we are all permitted to live, and to live eternally.
It happened through this man on the cross that God cancelled out and swept away all our human wickedness, our pride, our anxiety, our greed and our false pretences, whereby we had continually offended him and made life difficult, if not impossible, for ourselves and for others. He crossed out what had made our life fundamentally terrifying, dark and distressing – the life of health and of sickness, of happiness and of unhappiness, of the highborn and of the lowborn, of the rich and of the poor, of the free and of the captive. He did away with it. It is no longer part of us, it is behind us. In Jesus God made the day break after the long night and spring come after the long winter.
All these things happened in that one man. In Jesus, God took upon himself the full load of evil; he made our wickedness his own; he gave himself in his dear Son to be defamed as a criminal, to be accused, condemned, delivered from life unto death, as though he himself, the Holy God, had done all the evil we human beings did and do. In giving himself in Jesus Christ, he reconciled the world unto himself; he saved us and made us free to live in his everlasting kingdom; he removed the burden and took it upon himself He the innocent took the place of us the guilty. He the mighty took the place of us the weak. He the living One took the place of us the dying.
This, my dear friends, is the invisible event that took place in the suffering and death of the man hanging on the middle cross on Golgotha. This is reconciliation: his damnation our liberation, his defeat our victory, his mortal pain the beginning of our joy, his death the birth of our life. We do well to remember that this is what those who put him to death really accomplished. They did not know what they did. These deluded men and women accomplished by their evil will and deed that good which God had willed and done with the world and for the world, including the crowd of Jerusalem.
–Karl Barth (1886-1968) from a sermon in 1957
If you don’t have the time or interest to plow all the way through the thirteen volumes of Barth’s massive systematic theology, the justly famous Church Dogmatics, this brief excerpt gets to the heart of Barth’s deep devotion to Christ and illustrates his fundamental orthodoxy. Underneath all that sophisticated theologizing we see an ardent Christ-centered piety, a child-like faith.
It may be worth pointing out that we owe a big debt of gratitude to two prominent Anglican scholars for helping to translate Barth’s most important works into English. It was the great Cambridge NT scholar, Edwyn Hoskyns, who translated Barth’s early masterpiece, his influential commentary on Romans. And it was Fuller Seminary’s Geoffrey Bromiiey (an English priest) who, along with the leading Scottish Presbyterian theologian T. F. Torrance, rendered the multi-volume systematic theology into English. Moreover, the fact that both Hoskyns and Bromiley were motivated to do this shows the breadth of Barth’s appeal among orthodox Christians, for Hoskyns was an Anglo-Catholic whereas Bromiley was an evangelical. But both great Anglican scholars resonated with Barth’s emphatic criticism of the dominant Liberal Protestantism of the early 20th century theology.
David Handy+