The Covenant in the Theology of Karl Barth

Extract

In the theology of Karl Barth the fact of the life, death and J. resurrection of Jesus Christ is not merely the central point in our knowledge of God and His ways, a central point which might, however, be merely one, the greatest one, in a series of ways whereby we might know God and learn to speak about God. The Incarnation is for Barth the one and only revelation of God to men. In page after page he stresses that man by his unaided efforts can never know God. It is not only that man's reason is inadequate to read of God in the works of His hands, but by the fact of the Fall man has, ‘made himself quite impossible in relation to the redemptive Grace of God; and in so doing has made himself quite impossible in his created being as man, who has cut the ground from under his feet, who has lost his whole raison d'être‘ (p. 10). For such a man the knowledge of God has become quite out of the question, an utter impossibility, which can only again become possible in the quite incomprehensible ‘yet and never the less’ of the Grace of God in Jesus Christ, in Jesus Christ alone.