Hand-washing

“So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves. And all the people answered, “His blood be on us and our own children!” – Matthew 27.24-25

Pilate washes his hands, symbolising his self-proclaimed innocence in the matter of Jesus’ death, for he could find no guilt in him yet the crowd was baying for his blood. However, could there be more going on here than this? This episode has strong echoes of Deuteronomy 21, where we read the following instructions to be followed when someone is found murdered in the open country:

“And all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, and they shall testify, ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it shed. Accept atonement, O LORD, for your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and do not set the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of your people Israel, so that their bloodguilt may be atoned for.’ So you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from your midst, when you do what is right in the sight of the LORD.” – Deuteronomy 21.6-9

I think two things are going on here:

1. Jesus is the antitype of the heifer who is being sacrificed to make atonement for God’s people and to purge the guilt from them.

2. Perversely, Pilate stands the place of the elders as the one who washes his hands and proclaims his innocence with regard to Jesus’ death, while, rather than praying for God not to set the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of his people Israel, the Jews explicitly call down this guilt upon themselves. Is Matthew perhaps narrating the explicit rejection of Yahweh and his law by the Jews, leading to their resultant guilt and subsequent judgment, and the bringing in of Gentiles to the place of standing in God’s community, where guilt is atoned for, where they are ‘in the right’ in the sight of Yahweh?

Glory

This is a train of thought I had a little while ago, which was again set in motion last night when I read:

‘You guide me with your counsel, and afterwards you will receive me to glory.’ – Psalm 73.24

When we hear ‘glory’ used as a destination for human beings, I think we tend to automatically substitute ‘heaven’ or possibly, if we’re sharp, ‘new creation’. However, in the Psalter, ‘glory’ in connexion with human beings is not the intermediate state, or the general resurrection, but human beings in their position as God’s vice-gerents, wise rulers of the world he has made:

‘What is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honour.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.’ – Psalm 8.4-8

In the New Testament, we find that ‘glory’, this restoration of God’s original purposes for humanity in his creation, has come about through Jesus’ death. In Hebrews 2, this Psalm, which equates ‘glory’ with God=given authority over creation, is quoted, and we learn that, while we do not yet see everything in subjection to man, we see Jesus, as the second Adam, the true man, crowned with glory and honour because of his death. The writer then goes on to say:

‘For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.’ – Hebrews 2.10

When we sing, ‘As wounds which mar the Chosen One bring many sons to glory’, echoing those words from Hebrews 2, we are not singing, ‘Because of Jesus’ suffering and death, we can go to heaven when we die’ or even, ‘we can go to the new creation’ (although all of this is true); we are singing, ‘Because of Jesus’ suffering and death as the God-man, God’s programme for his creation has not failed, and fallen human beings have been restored to their position of authority over the created order as its wise rulers.’

Wright on the atonement

Whilst warning us to be wary of making abstractions about the atonement, Wright, in his discussion of how God deals once and for all with the problem of evil through the death of Jesus, he makes it clear that the theory of penal substitution is one, not insignificant, facet of the meaning of the cross, an expression of God’s amazing love.

For Paul, Jesus’ death clearly involves (in e.g. Romans 8.3) a judicial or penal element, being God’s proper No to sin expressed upon Jesus as Messiah, as Israel’s and therefore the world’s representative. This is the point at which the recognition that the line between good and evil runs right through the middle of me, and of every one of us, is met by the gospel proclamation that the death of Jesus is ‘for me’, in my place and on my behalf. Because, as Messiah, he is Israel’s and the world’s representative, he can stand in for all: for our sake, writes Paul, God made him who knew no sin to be sin, to be an offering for sin, on our behalf (2 Corinthians 5.21). Throughout the New Testament, this death is therefore seen as an act of love, both the love of Jesus himself (Galatians 2.20) and the love of the God who sent him and whose bodily self-expression he was (John 3.16, 13.1; Romans 5.6-11); 8.31-39; 1 John 4.9-10). Within these, not as the foundation but as the outworking, we see that Jesus’ suffering and death are an example of how we are summonded to love one another in turn.

Evil and the Justice of God, pp. 59-60

Tertia die resurrexit a mortuus

We (perhaps) conclude our Barth season with his observations of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Considered from the perspective of Jesus’ sufferings and death, alone, Barth says, those experiences are not victorious; it is not obvious that there, Jesus is the God-man bearing the curse of God in the place of humanity. The cross considered in and of itself is a concealment, a concealment of Jesus’ deity. Indeed, Barth takes the clause passus sub Pontio Pilato to really refer to the whole of Jesus’ incarnate existence before the cross; the miracles he performed and events such as the transfiguration are signs of the resurrection to come breaking into his earthly life. If you ask Barth what the resurrection means, he would answer, “Revelation!” It is from the perspective of the resurrection that we are to really understand what was happening as Jesus hung there on the cross. Because of the resurrection we can have assurance that we will not suffer God’s wrath, assurance of justification and freedom, an assurance that is not presumptuous because it is based on the work of Christ. The message that is revealed in the resurrection is one of unmerited, free grace.

The secret of Easter, on which something must be said in conclusion, can in its substance be none other than that of Good Friday – which again is that of Christmas. There is only one secret of Christian faith: God and man in their community through God’s free grace. What in particular makes, in this instance, this one secret the mystery of Easter is, to put it in the simpest way, this: that all we have recognised as the mystery of Good Friday is, as God’s decree, will and deed, true and valid. At the beginning we said one cannot believe in the Cross of Christ otherwise, and one cannot understand the Cross otherwise, than from His resurrection. All that in the crucifixion of Christ was done by God in a hidden way is by the resurrection set in the light and put into force. If what happened there is not hidden from us, then that is because Christ is risen. Because Christ is risen, and that is, because God goes His way in the Incarnation of His Word right to the end and because this end of His way means a new beginning for this flesh, i.e. for the human existence and destiny that God made His own in Jesus Christ. If this new beginning is manifest to us, then the significance also of the beginning of that way right up to the sepultus is by no means hidden. It means that what there befalls human state and fate, curse, punishment and ordeal, is a divine killing, but that, with what happened there, there was also carried out a divine quickening: an acquittal, a redeeming sacrifice, a victory for man. The new beginning, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, has nothing to add to that. The resurrection only reveals it, reveals that this is the way God has actually gone in the concealment of His surrendered, humiliated and suffering Son. The resurrection reveals it, in other words, says to us that this is true and therefore true for us, that it is for us that God has gone this way in His Son. It is no bold surmise, no dialectic sophistry, no religious arrogance if we believe – believe in the face of sin, evil, death and devil – that God’s wrath does not fall upon us, that we are righteous, that we are free, that is, that we are God’s and that the peace that passeth all understanding may be our consolation. In all that we are arrogating nothing to ourselves. Not for a moment do we forget that our whole being and all our thoughts, words and works are liable to utter damnation. But we ask: “Who is he that shall condemn? It is Christ that died, yea rather, That is risen again” (Rom. viii. 34). It is because He is risen again, because the self-surrender of God completed itself in the dawn of a new time, because the dawn of this new time was proclaimed to us, and because we can no more forget it, it is on this account that we put the question so defiantly. With that question, we are merely allowing God to be God! In allowing God to be God, the God Who in Christ went this way, in giving Him His place in faith as the God Who in Christ has killed us, too, and made us alive, we are new men “begotten again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (I Pet. i. 3). It is free grace that is the mystery of Easter. For most certainly in going thus to the end of His way, God has shown Himself as the free Lord over human existence and destiny. Most certainly this could bring Him no qualification to make such an exaltation possible nor of course any merit to make it necessary, although, on the other hand, it certainly put no hindrance in His way that could make it impossible. It is to this freedom of grace that the miracle of the resurrection points, and not otherwise than by this sign do we have this “matter,” do we have this gracious freedom of God and therefore the mystery of Easter before our eyes. And this mystery is grace. For most certainly that free undeserved act of God’s sovereignty – possible only with God, but with God not impossible – in His Son as the first-born among many brethren affects us.

In his commentary on the final words of the creed, carnis resurrectionem, vitam aeternam, Barth makes the point that the events of Easter in the middle of history are a sign of what is going to happen at the end of history. It seems appropriate to bring this up here. At that time, the union we have with Christ and all that we have in him which is now hidden, will be made manifest. Currently we are both sinners and justified, we have God’s treasure in jars of clay. We still face death, tears, sorrow and sighing. but Christ draws us after himself into his resurrection, when redeemed humanity, which is now hidden save only to him, is finally revealed.

Easter and the forty days were not a miracle tossed down by chance into the midst of human history, but the sign of what shall come to pass and be at the final end as the aim and meaning of all history. It is the message of the Kingdom of God which has not only come near, but which, when all other kingdoms have been done away, is the one and eternal Kingdom…

The resurrection of the flesh of which the symbol speaks, is the abolition of this position which is ours amid that contradiction between the grace and the gracelessness of our own existence as such. Resurrection of the flesh means that the question, “Who will separate us from the love of God?” – which here and now is certainly not one for which we are at a loss to find an answer – ceases in any sense to become a question. Resurrection of the flesh does not mean that the man ceases to be a man in order to become a god or angel, but that he may, according to I Cor. xv. 42 f., be a man in incorruption, power and honour, redeemed from that contradiction and so redeemed from the separation of body and soul by which this contradiction is sealed, and so in the totality of his human existence awakened from the dead. Resurrection of the flesh means very simply that the man will be in himself what he already is in Christ, new creation (2 Cor. v. 17); that the garment of unrighteousness drops away from him and the garment of righteousness which he has for long been wearing secretly becomes visible. Resurrection of the flesh means therefore that our existence as carnal existence, our heaven and earth as theatre of revolt, our time as time of Pontius Pilate, will be dissolved and changed into an existence, into a heaven and earth, into a time, of peace with God without conflict, of that peace which, hidden from our eyes in the flesh of Christ, is always a reality.

The Problem of Good

The older ways of talking about evil tended to pose the puzzle as a metaphysical or theological conundrum. If there is a god, and if he is (as classic Jewish, Muslim and Christian theology all claim), a good, wise and supremely powerful god, then why is there such a thing as evil? Even if you’re an atheist, you face the problem the other way up: is this world a sick joke, which contains some things that make us think it’s a wonderful place, and other things which make us think it’s an awful place, or what? You could of course refer to this as the problem of good rather than evil: if the world is the chance assembly of accidental phenomena, why is there so much that we want to praise and celebrate? Why is there beauty, love and laughter?

N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God, SPCK 2006, p. 5

Exegesis and the Science of History

Also in the Appendix to his Credo, Barth discusses the relationship between a theological approach to Scripture, interpreting the texts as given, and an historical approach to the same. He affirms that the theologian may learn beneficially from the historian at times, when the historian affirms that the revelatory events to which Scripture witnesses do, in fact, take place in time and space. Historical method is a servant to theological exegesis, which remains supreme; it must not supplant it as the correct method for exegesis. Barth’s analysis encourages us not be afraid if and when “history” disagrees with Scripture. The historical method is limited for it does not take into account the fact of God’s mighty acts in history but merely analyses reports in human terms, and so some of the events recorded in Scripture may end up being described as legend or myth. The former should not be a problem: this merely acknowledges that such events are problematic for human thought to comprehend. If the historian describes something in Scripture as the latter, i.e. that it has no basis in fact, then the scientific, historical approach to Scripture must simply be rejected, even if dialogue continues. When it comes to incredible stories in Scripture, such as the serpent talking in the Garden, Barth opposes its classification as myth, but neither would he describe it as historical in the strict sense in which we are talking about it, in the sense which presupposes the non-intervention of God and focuses solely on the human sphere. We should nevertheless hold on to the fact that it has been written for us in Scripture, listen and respond. The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.

Biblical exegesis can fundamentally only be interpretation of the texts furnished by Holy Scripture. Its task can never be to try to get behind the witness of these texts. But it repeats in explanatory form what the witness as such declares, what prophets and apostles testify of the “mighty acts of God”. Now there is also another way of regarding this event, and this witness to the event. There is an untheological exegesis. There is the great undertaking of the modern science of history. By that, I would understand the endeavour to peel of as far as possible, from reports of past events, all that is the contribution of the narrators and so expose what is “actually” the object of the reports (i.e. what is done and experienced by men). This object has to be worked out by the application of the categories of historical relation and historical analogy. The report under consideration is measured by them; they are the criterion, or, rather the probability-test for the discrimination and appraisal of the reports. The report is accordingly classified as history or, on the other hand, as myth, saga or legend. If the report does not conform with the categories, the historian speaks of myth, saga or legend. The modern science of history employs a reckoning of probability which rests on a conception of truth which is quite definitely limited. Its categories make no provision for the idea of a God Who acts in history and testifies to Himself in history. In spite of all that, ther can be no fundamental obstacle to the application to the Bible also of this procedure of the modern science of history. The Bible is certainly, among other things, a human document. That there is no denying, and the consequences of it are by no means merely deplorable. Why should it not be possible for the scientific method of history to render its quite definite service to the investigation and exposition of texts of Scripture? Theological exegesis itself is able to learn from it quite definite things. It is hard to see why this method should ahve to call a halt outside the Theology Faculty. Why should it not be applied in order to render its services to theological exegesis? Except that it must not raise the claim to be the method for true exegesis! … The theologian therefore has an attitude to, say a chapter of Matthew’s Gospel or even of John’s different from that of the historian. To the former the all-important thing is the text as such, while the latter, abstracting from the text, inquires, “how it was”. According there are no clashes between theological exegesis and the historical science when historical science recognises the content of a text as historical. Things are different when the historian thinks it incumbent upon him to speak of “saga” or “legend”. And yet I should have thought that this would have given no grounds for protest on the part of the theologian. The two conceptions obviously mean no more than that the reports are dealing with an event which as human event is problematical and which human thought, with its categories of relation and analogy, working on the basis of that limited conception of truth, finds it hard or impossible to explain. If only the theologians of the nineteenth century had not on their part succumbed to the historical way of thought, but had held fast to the wisdom of the Fathers, “It is written!” there would have been none of this difficulty in the situation as between exegesis and historical science. Strictly speaking, the protest of the theologian can only begin where the historian speaks of “myth“. A report that is to be understood as “myth” has not its basis in any event, nor even in something “said” to have taken place. Here, on the contrary, is nothing but human fantasy, a speculation about God and man. With the introduction of the idea of myth, theology sees its very presupposition attacked. There is nothing for it to do here but reject the historical method. In spite of this the dialogiue between exegesis and historical science can go on… The theologian mat then ask the historian whether the reason of his finding myths in the Bible may not be that he is himself an all-too mythical thinker, as indeed there has scarcely ever been thought so mythical as that for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and so on.

We must not be surprised continually to meet texts in the Bible that are not able to hold out in face of the conception of the truth held by historical science, but that the historian will be able to classify only as “saga” or “legend”. But just these texts draw our attention to the fact that, while the Bible is concerned with a happening, it is the happening of the mighty act of God! Qualiter? totaliter aliter than every other happening! …

I would decidedly oppose characterising this incident [whether the serpent in Paradise "really" spoke] as “myth”. No more can I, on the other hand, characterise it, in the sense of historical science, as “historical,” for a speaking serpent – now, indeed I am as little able to imagine that (apart from everything else!) as anyone. But I should like to ask the dear friends of the speaking serpent whether it would not be better to hold fast to the fact that this “is written” and to go on an interest themselves in what the serpent spoke?

Honour your father and mother

At the end of his Credo, Barth responds to letters that have been sent to him regarding what he has written. He criticises the “just me and my Bible” attitude of eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal Protestants and he emphasises the need for hearing the Bible in the church, corporately as the body of Christ, so that we are not to neglect the writings of the Church Fathers, the Councils and the Reformers. Scripture nevertheless remains the authority by which the testimony of these writings and standards to God’s revelation in Christ are accepted or rejected. His words could equally be directed to a significant part of contemporary evangelicalism, whose approach is perhaps closer to liberalism that it would like to think.

There is this to be said – and it is in consonance with the Fathers of the Early Church and of the Reformation, that in the Church there can never be any question of overleaping the centuries and immediately (each trusting to the sharpness of his eye and the openness of his heart) linking up with the Bible. That is the Biblicism that significantly appeared again and again in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the idea that it is possible to dismiss with a lofty gesture Nicænum, Orthodoxy, Scholasticism, Church Father, Confessions and clinb “to the Bible alone”! … Luther and Calvin did not go to work on the Bible in this way. Neither should we. It is in the Church that the Bible is read; it is by the Church that the Bible is heard. That means that in reading the Bible we should hear what the Church, the Church that is distinguished from my person, has up to now read and heard from the Bible. Are we at liberty to ignore all that? Do the great teachers of the Church, do the Councils not possess a – certainly not heavenly – but, even so, earthly, human “authority”? We should not be too ready to say, No. To my mind the whole question of tradition falls under the Fifth Commandment: Honour father and mother! Certainly that is a limited authority; we have to obey God more than father and mother. But we also have to obey father and mother. And so I should call to all those who get excited when they hear the words Orthodoxy, Council, Catechism: Dear friends, no excitement! There is no question of bondage and constraint. It is merely that in the Church the same kind of obedience as, I hope, you pay to your father and mother, is demanded of you towards the Church’s past, towards the “elders” of the Church. That is quite simply an ordinance… In this obedience to the Church’s past, it is always possible to be a very free theologian. But it must be borne in mind that, as a member of the Church, as belonging to the congregatio fidelium, one must not speak without having first heard. The Reformers knew that. You are aware that, in the Confessions, they refer to the Councils of the early Church, and there can be no question that, with regard also to the content of their teaching, they appealed to the verdicts made by the Church in past times…

The more one listens and breaks free from the illusion that the world began with oneself, the more will one discover that these Fathers knew something, and that the scorned “orthodox” writers of, say, the seventeenth century were theologians of stature. And it can even happen that alongside of them modern theological literature will be found a little insipid and a little tedious. You must make the experiment yourselves. I, too, was once liberal and know the charm! …

The past, too, had its mixture of pure and impure doctrine. The norm that determines our choice is Holy Scripture. Holy Scripture is the object of our study, and at the same time the criterion of our study, of the Church’s past. As I read the writings of the “Fathers,” the witness of Holy Scripture stands continually before my eyes; I accept what interprets this witness to me; I reject what contradicts it. So a choice is actually made, certainly not a choice according to my individual taste, but according to my knowledge of Holy Scripture.

Sepultus

Easter Eve marks the in-between time after Christ’s suffering, crucifixion, death and burial while his body lay in the tomb, before he was raised from the dead on the first day of the week. The liturgy of the Church of England (I cannot speak for other traditions) focuses on our baptismal union with Christ in his death and burial and its implications for the mortification of our sinful nature, looking forward beyond the grave and death to our own resurrection, just as Christ’s death and burial, his saving work which is the basis for our hope, moves from Good Friday and Easter Eve to Easter Day, the Day of Resurrection.

Grant, Lord,
that we who are baptized into the death
of your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ
may continually put to death our evil desires
and be buried with him;
and that through the grave and gate of death
we may pass to our joyful resurrection;
through his merits,
who died and was buried and rose again for us,
your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Barth, at the conclusion of his exposition of the article of the Apostles’ Creed dealing with Christ’s crucifixion, death, and burial, proclaims the assurance of acquittal, rescue from judgement, peace, and freedom to serve him that Christ’s death on the cross brings as he bears our punishment, and from this perspective, Barth also considers the meaning and implications of baptism.

If God Himself in Jesus Christ bears the curse that must fall upon transgressors of His law, then it really is borne; then there can be no thought of our bearing it again and further. Then we are acquitted according to the law, yes, declared righteous. For if God’s curse no longer falls on us, what can we be – there is no third possibility – what can we me in His sight, and that means in reality, but righteous? If God Himself in Jesus Christ suffers the punishment that our existence would have to incur, then that means that He, this Other, has sacrificed his existence for us. It follows that we can only recognise ourselves as those whom He has thereby won for himself, who have therefore become is property. If God will not punish us because the punishment is over and done with, then that means that we may now live as those who have been released by Him and who are therefore His own. Finally, if without ceasing to be God, God in Jesus Christ entered into the ordeal, if Jesus Christ descended into hell and thereby actually doubted Himself as to His being God and man in one, what else can we take that to mean than that He did that also for us and relieved us of it? It is no longer necessary that we go to hell. And we shall no longer require to go to hell in order to ask ourselves there: why has God forsaken us? If we think we have occasion for this question, we should consider that Jesus Christ put it long ago and answered it in our place. How could His way into hell have been other than a victorious way? And by this victorious way He has made a breathing space for us, i.e. the peace that garrisons our hearts and minds, that is and continues to be peace in face of every ordeal because, passing all understanding, it is His own peace, the peace of God.

From this point we can look back again to the remarkable fact that Paul saw the reality of what happens to man in baptism is this: that we are buried with Christ. It is actually possible for that which is the burial of Christ to be present now to us. It is the decisive word of that free grace in which in Jesus Christ God gave up His own Son for us. Burial with Christ would then mean, we were standing under His Name as actually those for whom that took place, who now may live as those for whom it did take place.

Redemption

There are lots of great poems to provide food for meditation this Good Friday, and several from George Herbert, but here is one which highlights – I think – the unfruitfulness of the unconverted life and the life which Christ gives through his incarnation and death to those who ask him which is not burdensome, against the background of his desire for a whole land whose purchase price is costly – again, becoming a man and surrendering his own life. Christ overturns our conception of greatness: he is to be found, not in the prestigious places of the world, but amongst criminals, both in his life, as those he came to save, and in his death, as those with and by whom he was crucified. In bringing about the salvation of individuals and the world by his death, Christ’s glory is revealed. God chooses what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chooses what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chooses what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’old.
In heaven at his manor I him sought:
They told me there, that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

Crucifixus, mortuus et sepultus, descendit ad inferos

For Barth, God reveals to us in the events of that first Good Friday – the suffering, crucifixion, death and burial of the God-man Christ Jesus – what we are like and what we deserve, things which we cannot grasp by our reason alone.

If God had not become man in Jesus Christ, had not descended to that deepest ultimate concealment of His divinity, in truth we neither could nor would know what sin is and therefore what judgment is. In Jesus Christ, it meets us as condemned sin. Ecce homo: there, that is man: the enemy of God and therefore – for who could hope to resist God? – crushed by the wrath of God. We may, we must now after the event, listen to Christ’s telling us who we are ourselves, what is our significance and fate that God has there made His own, telling us what is in truth the importance of the burial, of the passing away that we have all to face. It is something that even now we have got to be told.

Barth articulates the meaning of Christ’s crucifixion, death and burial in terms of the Scriptural ideas of acquittal, sacrifice and victory; this saving significance is not intuitive to human reason, but is dependent on the witness of revelation to the fact that it was God who was surrendering himself in the life and death of the man Christ Jesus. It is worth noting in passing that Barth sees Christ’s descent to hell as a proclamation of what he achieved.

The same words crucifixus, mortuus, descendit ad inferos describe what befell the man Jesus of Nazareth as at once the execution of an acquittal that is passed upon us (crucifixus signifies: “He hath blotted out the handwriting that was against us… and hath taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross,” Col. ii. 14), as the making of a sacrifice offered on our behalf (mortuus means: He gives His life a ransom for many,” Mark x. 45), as the occurrence of a divine victory creating space and air (descendit ad inferos means: “He preached unto the spirits in prison,” 1 Pet. iii. 19, and “the lion of the tribe of Judah hath prevailed,” Rev v. 5).

As Barth himself would have us do, let us look at Christ in his suffering, crucifixion, death, burial and descent into hell and humble ourselves and renew our commitment to live disciplined, holy lives as we see that we are sinners deserving of condemnation. And let us also rejoice in all that Christ has achieved for us as we see that he has borne all that would bring upon us God’s curse, condemnation and judgment as a sacrifice, thus acquitting us and gaining the victory.

Passio sub Pontio Pilato

With this post, I hope to begin a series for Good Friday, Easter Even, and Easter Day highlighting some relevant passages in Karl Barth’s Credo which I have been reading recently. Early in the morning on that first Good Friday,  Jesus was delivered to the governor, Pontius Pilate to be tried. Barth asks why the authors of the Apostles’ Creed saw fit to add that Christ’s sufferings took place under Pontius Pilate and answers that this dispels any Platonic notion that eternal truths can be extracted from the content of the Christian faith apart from historical reality and continue to remain Christian. No, he says, it is integral to the Christian faith and is an event that took place in our time. (Barth will also go on to say that this old time is a time characterised by disobedience, but in the resurrection, a new time has begun, although still within the old time.)

How does Pontius Pilate get into the Credo? The simple answer can at once be given: it is a matter of date. The name of the Roman procurator in whose term of office Jesus Christ was crucified, proclaims: at such and such a point of historical time this happened. And the symbol intends to express just that: that what it has to say about Jesus Christ happened at a definite and a definitely assignable time within that time which is ours also. With that a line is drawn, a polemic is directed against a Gnostic Christ-idealism. If the Word became flesh, then it became temporal, and the reality of the revelation in Jesus Christ was what we call the lifetime of a man. It was not only that, but it was also that. It is an eternal but no timeless reality; it is at once an eternal and a temporal reality. It is not a timeless essence of all or of some times. It is not to be discovered by laboriously extracting such a thing as a timeless spirit or a timeless substance out of all times, or out of definite times, even that of the years 1 to 30. It will never be understood by anyone who is irritated by this concretion, who would like to free it of the temporal that clings to it, who fancied that he could get past its temporal concretion to its ideal substance. It is essentially concrete and therefore temporal and therefore capable of temporal definition, in the same way as, say, the rule of Pericles in Athens. The man who is hankering after the so-called “eternal verities” had best, if he is determined not to be converted, leave his faith uncontaminated with Christian faith.

Et in Jesum Christum

“What we are concerned with is that absolute impossibility, that the Holy One, Whose wrath we have provoked, became man, in order, in spite of everything, to befriend us, to bear this wrath Himself and in our place, accordingly to suffer in our place His own burning wrath, to give satisfaction Himself in our place, in order in that way to be our God (and that means, to be good for us un a way that we have not deserved and cannot comprehend), He Himself, directly and personally our Prophet, Priest, and King.”

- Karl Barth, Lecture V, ‘Et in Jesum Christum filium eius unicum’, in Credo

A Tract

I have been trying to design an evangelistic tract (does that make me a Tractarian, I wonder?) for use on Cornmarket, and at other times. There are plenty of tracts around, including a number of splendid ones from Roger Carswell (although he can be Amyraldian at times) so I need to justify my contribution. I wanted to write a tract that,

1. was explicitly Trinitarian (see post below, although my tract idea came before reading Barth)
2. articulated the gospel primarily in terms of the indicatives of God’s saving plan in Christ for the world, with the individual response to the gospel presented the context of that
3. presented the Christian hope as resurrection from the dead and life in the new creation
4. made mention of baptism as part of becoming a Christian, not just praying a prayer.

I had the idea of producing this tract as a postcard, with a verse on one side, and the exposition on the other. The design is meant to be clear, simple and basic with nothing to distract. Most tracts are garish or having annoying pictures of mountains or fields or flowers. There are a number of sites on the interweb where you can design and order postcards cheaply. This is what I have come up with so far:

Trinity and Evangelism

I recently started reading Karl Barth’s exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, Credo, and one of the things with which I have been greatly impressed so far is his emphasis on our utter dependence on God’s sheer grace and our absolute need for him to reveal himself to us, since we are unable to know him by nature. One of the ways he articulates that particularly lucidly is in his treatment of the phrase, ‘I believe in God’ in the Creed. He makes the point that there is no idea of ‘God’ of which we all – believing or not – have some conception, with the Christian faith coming along and providing the details of what this God is like, namely Father, Son and Holy Spirit; rather God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which we can only know by his revelation of himself to us, and any other conception of God apart from this is idolatry.

The relationship between this “in God” and what follows in the three parts of the symbol with regard to Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot and must not in any circumstances be understood in the sense that this “in God” signifies, as it were, the specification of a general concept of known content which then receives in the three parts of the symbol its special historical ingredients, namely, the Christian filling out and elaboration. “God” in the meaning of the symbol – of the symbol which aims at giving again the testimony of the prophets and apostles – “God” is not a magnitude with which the believer is already acquainted before he is a believer, so that as believer he merely experiences an improvement and enrichment of knowledge that he already had… The word “God” in the symbol, therefore, must not mislead us into first giving consideration to the nature and the attributes of a being which on the basis of our most comprehensive experiences and deepest reflection, we think we have discovered as that which this name may and must fit, in order thereupon, under the guidance of the historical statements of the symbol, to ascribe to the subject so conceived this and that definite predicate, behaviour and act. On the contrary, we have to begin with the admission that of ourselves, we do not know what we say when we say “God,” i.e. that all we think we know when we say “God” does not reach and comprehend Him Who is called “God” in the symbol, but always one of our self-conceived and self-made idols…

In telling us that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the symbol which speaks of God on the basis and in the sense of the prophetic-apostolic witness, expresses absolutely for the first and only time Who God is and What God is. God is God precisely and only in that being and action which are here, in a new and peculiar way, designated as those of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit.

What struck me about the implications of this is how we speak of God in our evangelism. Most evangelistic talks I have heard don’t present God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but rather just as “God”, revealing that there is an underlying assumption that we all have some true idea of what God is like. The inestimable Roger Carswell alone is – from memory – I think, a notable exception to this. Now I am not saying that all our gospel presentations need to include an exposition of the Athanasian Creed (“not three incomprehensibles but one incomprehensible”) but perhaps we should be making it explicit that the God of whom we are speaking is the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons in eternal, loving community, lest by our omission we are actually proclaiming an idol.