God of the Gospel

God of the Gospel November 17, 2014

Barth in fully Barthian regalia (Church Dogmatics, IV.1, 186-7):

“As God was in Christ, far from being against Himself, or at disunity with Himself, He has put into effect the freedom of His divine love, the love in which He is divinely free. He has therefore done and revealed that which corresponds to His divine nature. His immutability does not stand in the way of this. It must not be denied, but this possibility is included in His unalterable being. He is absolute, infinite, exalted, active, impassible, transcendent, but in all this He is the One who loves in freedom, the One who is free in His love, and therefore not His own prisoner. He is all this as the Lord, and in such a way that He embraces the opposites of these concepts even while He is superior to them.”

We make a mistake “if we think that this is impossible.” We do so only when “our concept of God is too narrow, too arbitrary, too human – far too human.” The bottom line is: “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.”


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