Matthew McConnell’s Reviews > Church Dogmatics 2.2: The Doctrine of God > Status Update

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!”