Status Updates From Church Dogmatics 2.2: The D...

“Judas, the παραδιδούς, in his concentrated attack upon Israel’s Messiah, does only what the elect people of Israel had always done toward its God, thus finally showing itself in its totality to be the nation rejected by God.”

I did not expect a 50 page footnote on Judas but it has been wonderful: “In one sense Judas is the most important figure in the New Testament apart from Jesus. For he, and he alone of the apostles, was actively at work in this decisive situation, in the accomplishment of what was God‘s will and what became the content of the Gospel. Yet he is the very one who is most explicitly condemned by the Law of God.”

“It is a matter of the reconciliation of man to God to the extent that this must basically subsist in his cleansing from sin. But man… is guilty. Therefore he needs to be cleansed. Yet he cannot cleanse himself. If it is to happen at all, this cleansing must be accomplished by God. His sins must be forgiven him. And this is just what happened when God delivered up Christ and Christ delivered up Himself.”

Barth after noting a reportage discrepancy between Mark and Matthew: “The question which account is correct is again a pointless one.”

“The will of God triumphs in Jesus Christ because He is the way from the heights to the depths, and back again to the heights; the fulfilment but also the limitation of the divine No by the divine Yes. God presents this man in omnipotent loving-kindness as His Elect, and Himself as the God who elects this man. Jesus Christ is this irreversible way; and therefore He is also the truth and the life.”

The determination of the elect to be the object of the love of God is undoubtedly his determination to blessedness. The glory of God, to share in which is the intention and purpose of His love for the creature, is the overflowing of the inner perfection and joy of God. God chooses the elect from eternity and for eternity, that he may catch up a beam or a drop of His own blessedness and live as its possessor.

Pt 3/3 - “He may and shall live as a partner in the covenant which God of Himself willed and established…. Whatever else this may signify, it signifies love. Severe, wrathful, burning love—but love; and love that is eternal, not bounded by the limitations of creatureliness, forgiving his sin, giving the creature a share in the glory of the Creator.”

Pt 2/3 - “This is indeed the determination of Jesus Christ Himself—in our flesh to be the One loved of God from and to all eternity…. Obviously no man can be anything other or better than this—one who is loved by God. This is what God wills with him—to love him. And this is what He wills from him—to allow himself to be loved by Him. It is for this purpose that He elects him.”

Pt. 1/3 - “We reach back to the basis and root of the true doctrine of predestination if we begin with the statement that the determination of the elect consists in the fact that he allows himself to be loved by God—to live as one whom from all eternity God in His incomprehensible and unmerited goodness did not will to renounce, and therefore will not renounce.”

After having spent 16 pages providing historical and theological exegesis of 1 Kings 13, he says that it is “perhaps the most expressive and at any rate the richest and most comprehensive prophetic story in the Old Testament.”

Later: “At the exact point where this story of the prophets breaks off, a continuation is found in the Easter story.”

Barth’s exposition of this passage is utterly amazing.

Continued… “If we accept the decision of the apostles—for the same reasons as they did, compelled by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and therefore as a decision of faith in Him—then the affirmation that the elect king, of whom they speak, is Jesus of Nazareth, will be not merely possible but necessary as the last word in the exegesis of these passages [in 1 & 2 Samuel]. The last word!”

[When the apostles saw Jesus Christ as the Subject of the OT], they “did not reach their answer as a possibility discovered and selected by themselves, or as a final triumph of Jewish biblical scholarship. They did so because the Old Testament was opened up to them by its fulfillment in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

Continued…

“[Christ] is the Rejected, as and because He is the Elect. In view of His election, there is no other rejected but Himself. It is just for the sake of the election of all the rejected that He stands in solitude over against them all. It is just for them that He is the rejected One (in His rejection making room for them as the elect of God), and therefore the one and only object of the divine election of grace.”

“The elect are, therefore, those who walk before God and find His good-pleasure. How can it be otherwise when they are His, when they are His friends, His children? His good-pleasure towards them is grounded in the fact that in them He recognises Himself.”

Continued… “And it is for thee that Jesus Christ is the elect man of God and arrayed in divine glory. Eternal life and fellowship with God await thee. Jesus Christ died and rose for thee. It is thou who art elect with Him and through Him.”

“Thou art isolated from God, and therefore a godless man. Thou art threatened. And yet thou standest indeed under a wholly new determination. It was for thee that Jesus Christ Himself bore the divine rejection in its real and terrible consequences. Thou art the one who has been spared from enduring it. And it is for thee that Jesus Christ is the elect one who has been spared from enduring it.”

Continued in next

“[Man] can certainly rebel (he does so); but he can accomplish nothing which abolishes the choice of God. He can certainly flee from God (he does so) ; but he cannot escape Him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God (he does and is so); but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in His hate…. He may let go of God, but God does not let go of him.”

😮‍💨

“Whoever has Jesus Christ in faith cannot wish not to have the Jews. He must have them along with Jesus Christ as His ancestors and kinsmen. Otherwise he cannot have even the Jew Jesus. Otherwise, with the Jews he rejects Jesus himself…. [Gentile Christians] should not approach any Israelite without the greatest attention and sympathy.”

“The existence of Christian Jews… will always remain a special sign of grace. And only a cheerless, unspiritual way of thinking can occasion a Christian Jew to be ashamed of his origin from Israel or a Gentile Christian to hold it against him. It is a mark of supreme and indelible honor to be a Christian Jew.”

Barth’s exegesis of Romans 9 is utterly incredible.

“It was perhaps the decisive exegetical error of the classical doctrine of predestination—being more concerned about the things of men (although not to their advantage) than the things of God—it thought to see the scope of Rom. 9:18 in the personal situation and destiny of Moses and Pharaoh (as of Rom. 9:8f. in that of the different sons of Abraham and Isaac).”

“It is quite impossible that the Israel which resists its election, which fails to recognize and rejects its Messiah, can as such be in a position to apprehend itself along with the Church as the one community of God and at the same time, within this one community, to discern the special form of its own election in distinction from that of the Church.”

Thank you, Karl.

“There can be no praise of man, no boasting or arbitrary pretension on man’s part, but only discipleship, thankfulness and adoration. But for the same reason there is also in this relationship a royal self-awareness on the part of the Elect. Because the eternal predestination is made manifest to us in that history of salvation, we accept it as the secret of everything else that takes place in the world.”

“God removed from man and took upon Himself the burden of the evil which unavoidably threatened and actually achieved and exercised dominion in the world that He had ordained as the theatre of His glory. God removed from man and took upon Himself the suffering which resulted from this dominion, including the condemnation of sinful man.

“Starting from Jn. 1ff., we have laid down and developed two statements concerning the election of Jesus Christ. The first is that Jesus Christ is the electing God. This statement answers the question of the Subject of the eternal election of grace. And the second is that Jesus Christ is elected man. This statement answers the question of the object of the eternal election of grace.“

“[T]he Supralapsarian God threatens to take on the appearance of a demon, and in the light of this fact, we may well understand the horror with which Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Arminians and even many of the Reformed themselves recoiled from the doctrine.”

“He had no need of a creation. He might well have been satisfied with the inner glory of His threefold being, His freedom, His love. The fact that He is not satisfied, but that His inner glory overflows and becomes outward, the fact that he wills the creation, and the man Jesus as the first-born of all creation, is grace, sovereign grace, a condescension inconceivably tender.”

I am 110 pages into this 800 page tome and it is quite literally the best work of theology I have ever read in my life.

“Even the enemies of God are the servants of God and the servants of His grace…. God is gracious and continues gracious even where there is no grace. And it is only by grace that the lack of grace can be recognised as such…. To know Him always means to know the gracious God, even in sin and death, even under the dominion of the devil, even in the abyss of hell.”

“God is from the very first the gracious God…. [His self-movement towards man] is always the very best thing that could happen to man. The reality and revelation of this movement is Jesus Christ himself.”

“Face to face with its Messiah, the Son of David who was also the Son of God, Israel knew no better than to give Him up to the Gentiles to be put to dcath on the cross… And yet because the righteousness of God stands fast like the mountains against the unrighteousness of man, this coming was also to the benefit of Israel, and of the Gentiles, and of the world.”