#itscomplete

[proficientbuilders]

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[babblebitecreative-blog]

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[davebinggeli]

Barth on salvation

  Here's a lengthy extract from G. Hunsinger's 'How to read Karl Barth':

"There can be no question," writes Earth, about "the being of Jesus Christ" for us, "and therefore about our being in him. There can be no question as to the love with which God has loved us from all eternity and once for all in time. This does not need our assistance or completion or co-operation or even repetition. It does not even need to be seen by us" (IV/2, 296 rev.). It obtains, whether we have come to acknowledge it yet or not. For the great alter- ation of the human situation—our being reconciled to God—has already taken place. "This being is self-contained. It does not have to be reached or created. It has already come and cannot be removed. It is indestructi- ble, it can never be superseded, it is in force, it is directly present" (IV/ 1, 90). Our being in Christ is understood in the strongest possible terms: as an "ontological connection." It is a connection that is grounded and established not by our action but solely by his action, not in our experi- ence (whatever it might be) but solely in his experience (i.e., his death and resurrection), and therefore, most simply and comprehensively, not in ourselves but solely in himself (IV/2, 275).

It follows, by virtue of this ontological connection, that the gospel "does not indicate possibilities but declares actualities" (IV/2, 275). The gospel declares that we human beings are actually in Christ by Christ. Our being in Christ by Christ confronts us "not merely as an offer and possibility, but as a reality, an event, which in its scope is actually de- terminative of all human existence. The significance of the existence of this man for ours is not just potential but actual; a significance to which we and all persons are to be referred at once and without reserve" (IV/ 2, 267 rev.). The gospel does not proclaim that if only we will fulfill certain conditions, salvation will then be effective for us. It does not proclaim that if only we will make the necessary decision, or undergo the stipulated religious experience, or right the appointed social wrong, or receive the properly validated sacrament—if only we will meet some par- ticular requirement or actualize some particular possibility—then and only then will salvation be ours. The gospel does not turn itself at the last moment back into the law from which it was meant to deliver us. It does not abandon the realm of freedom by sending us back into the throes of necessity.

Our salvation in Christ, as Earth understands it, is already effective. We need only to receive and acknowledge it in freedom, not to make it effective ourselves. "Is Jesus Christ only the possibility and not rather the full actuality of the grace of God? Is his intervention for us sinners anything other or less than the divine forgiveness itself? And what does this forgiveness lack in order to be effective if it has taken place in him" (IV/1, 487)? Salvation is not an open possibility but an effective reality, precisely because it is an event—an event that is "comprehensive, total and definitive" (IV/1, 547). It takes place apart from us, but not without including us. It takes place just by including us in the history of Jesus Christ. "His history is as such our history" (IV/1, 548). His history is our history, because in his life, death, and resurrection he has made our situation his own. "We are the participants in this great drama. That history is, in fact, our history. We have to say indeed that it is our true history, in an incomparably more direct and intimate way than anything which might present itself as our history in our own subjective experience" (IV/1, 547). 

... a few pages on...

"Jesus Christ is understood as objectively effective and significant in himself. He is the decisive locus of salvation prior to and independent of our faith (or lack of faith) as well as prior to and apart from our love (or lack of love). From this standpoint Earth is able to eliminate the last vestiges of an idea that lingers even within the theology of the Reformers (to say nothing of other theologies)—the idea that God's grace is some- how conditional. For despite the denials of official doctrine that grace is conditional, and despite some very important moves in the opposite di- rection, in actual practice the Reformation proclamation of the gospel could still commonly take the following form: "If you repent and be- lieve, you will be saved; if you do not repent and believe, you will not be saved." Earth's theology, by contrast, makes the following form of proclamation to be categorically normative: "This is what God in Jesus Christ has done for your sake; therefore, repent and believe." The second form (which, of course, was also strongly validated by the Reformation) is obviously distinguished from the first by being unmistakably uncondi- tional.3 It proclaims the gospel as an invitation to respond accordingly, and not in any sense as a summons (or an implicit threat) to do something (however defined) so as to include oneself within salvation's reality and truth. Since, in Earth's understanding. God has already freely included us, it falls to us henceforth freely to receive our inclusion as the gift it is proclaimed to be"