The gap between the knowable transcendent God is bridged in Christ ... but then for the Christian, in suffering.
Barth, Epistle to the Romans, paperback edn 1968 (London: OUP, 1933), pp. 304-5:
"What place does suffering, that vast and immeasurable factor of human life, occupy in the context of our Sonship? Evidentally, suffering cannot be compared with the glory of God so as to disturb or prevent our entering in to that 'Now' to which we have free access, because the conscious recognition of suffering is the gateway to knowledge and redemption which is in the 'Now', in the Spirit, in Jesus Christ. God reckons with us precisely at the door of suffering. There it is that he justifies himself in our presence and teaches us through His Spirit to cry abba, Father. It is thus evident that time is the negation of infinity. In that negation men encounter the barrier which confironts them, and discover also the place of exit. Where then should the power of the Spirit be displayed, if not in the action of God by which He makes us participate in the sufferings of Christ (vi. 5) and thereby brings us within the sphere of the freedom and glory of the new man? The sufferings of the present time cannot, therefore be compared with this glory. In Christ Jesus they have indeed been compared and have been shown not merely to be characteristic of our life in this world, but actually to mark the frontier where this life is dissolved by life eternal. The time in which we live and suffer is the present time, the time when glory is manifest in suffering. So clearly does God manifest His glory in the secret of suffering, that, so far from shrinking for His sake from the contemplation of suffering, it is for His sake that we are bound to gaze upon it, to see in it the step, the movement, the turning point from death to life, and to apprehend it as the place which Christ is to be seen. To overlook suffering is to overlook Christ. To ask the question why there should be suffering, is to fail to hear that the same question is addressed to us. To answer that suffering is unintelligible to us, that we cannot bear it or master it or turn it to any good account, means that we are deaf to the divine answer which is given precisely in our inability.
[My bold]
[The rhetoric is deafening. The confidence and bluster catches the reader - this man must know what he is talking about. Where else could such passion and articulation come from?]
[Is this the most profound thing ever written ... or a hoax, which simply restates Kant's position on our finitude with some wishful thinking that God is actually smiling upon us behind the curtain of transcendence?]
Barth, Epistle to the Romans, paperback edn 1968 (London: OUP, 1933), pp. 304-5:
"What place does suffering, that vast and immeasurable factor of human life, occupy in the context of our Sonship? Evidentally, suffering cannot be compared with the glory of God so as to disturb or prevent our entering in to that 'Now' to which we have free access, because the conscious recognition of suffering is the gateway to knowledge and redemption which is in the 'Now', in the Spirit, in Jesus Christ. God reckons with us precisely at the door of suffering. There it is that he justifies himself in our presence and teaches us through His Spirit to cry abba, Father. It is thus evident that time is the negation of infinity. In that negation men encounter the barrier which confironts them, and discover also the place of exit. Where then should the power of the Spirit be displayed, if not in the action of God by which He makes us participate in the sufferings of Christ (vi. 5) and thereby brings us within the sphere of the freedom and glory of the new man? The sufferings of the present time cannot, therefore be compared with this glory. In Christ Jesus they have indeed been compared and have been shown not merely to be characteristic of our life in this world, but actually to mark the frontier where this life is dissolved by life eternal. The time in which we live and suffer is the present time, the time when glory is manifest in suffering. So clearly does God manifest His glory in the secret of suffering, that, so far from shrinking for His sake from the contemplation of suffering, it is for His sake that we are bound to gaze upon it, to see in it the step, the movement, the turning point from death to life, and to apprehend it as the place which Christ is to be seen. To overlook suffering is to overlook Christ. To ask the question why there should be suffering, is to fail to hear that the same question is addressed to us. To answer that suffering is unintelligible to us, that we cannot bear it or master it or turn it to any good account, means that we are deaf to the divine answer which is given precisely in our inability.
[My bold]
[The rhetoric is deafening. The confidence and bluster catches the reader - this man must know what he is talking about. Where else could such passion and articulation come from?]
[Is this the most profound thing ever written ... or a hoax, which simply restates Kant's position on our finitude with some wishful thinking that God is actually smiling upon us behind the curtain of transcendence?]
1 comment:
'Behind the transcendence' or is he saying, 'in the transcendence' compared to our finitude. Suffering is of the temporal and finite and we know this truly when we come to Christ and see him, suffering, temporal, finite. In him we come to know ourselves and our present and future, as creatures drawn into the life of the eternal God.
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