Reading Karl Barth for the Church by Kimlyn J. Bender

Author:Kimlyn J. Bender
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Theology;Karl Barth (1886–1968);Kirchliche Dogmatik;Doctrinal Theology;REL067080;REL067000
ISBN: 9781493417940
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

COMMENTARY

The Doctrine of Christology as a Biblical Question

At the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity is a christological question: Who is Jesus Christ? The early church, in battles that need not be rehearsed here, confessed that the Son was not a creation of, but rather was begotten by, the Father, and therefore the Son shared in the essence and existence of God. As the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ was God’s own Son, and this eternal Son was Jesus Christ—two truths that, as Barth realized, are juxtaposed but not harmonized in the NT witness. Further reflection by the early church extended such official conciliar recognition to the Spirit, and the doctrine of the Trinity and the christological and pneumatological convictions of the church were codified in creeds and definitions at such councils as Nicaea (AD 325), Constantinople (AD 381), Ephesus (AD 431), and Chalcedon (AD 451).

It is again helpful, however, to remember that these decisions and the debates surrounding them were not simply philosophical or, more cynically, merely political in nature. They grew out of reflection upon the biblical witness, in which Jesus is announced as the Word of God through whom all things were made and through whom all things exist (John 1:1–3; cf. Eph. 1:3–14; Col. 1:15–17; Heb. 1:2). The NT writers shockingly place God and Jesus in a relation of shared action and identical if parallel honor, as when Paul writes that “for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor. 8:6). Jesus Christ is portrayed in the NT as the fulfillment of all of God’s promises of old and the ground and hope of the future, the one who is “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end,” another title that Christ shares with God the Father (Rev. 22:13; cf. 1:8). Even in the earliest Gospel, Jesus is portrayed as rebuking the seas in a way that the OT reserved for God himself (see Mark 4:35–41; cf. Ps. 107:23–32), and his walking on the water and calling out to the disciples with the terse identification “It is I” has direct allusions to God’s own traverse upon the waters in the OT and declaration of his name as “I AM” (see Mark 6:47–52; cf. Job 9:8; 38:16; Ps. 77:19; Isa. 43:16; for the divine name, see Exod. 3:14).6

One of the commendable achievements of the nineteenth-century liberal tradition was an attempt to take the humanity of Jesus with full seriousness. Yet something was lost. Jesus was portrayed as a moral teacher or exemplar, as an apocalyptic yet tragic crucified prophet, or as a religious genius—and there were more portraits than these of what came to be called “the historical Jesus.” While some like Schleiermacher brilliantly attempted to retain Jesus’s uniqueness, efforts such as his to ground this uniqueness in a perfected human religious feeling, capacity,

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