"But Barth did have an answer to the question he had posed: where does the world of God have an opening towards society? God would not be God if the matter rested with the antithesis in which the world of God stands over against this world. There must be a way from there to here, since clearly there is no way from here to there. Everything which he had said up to this point rested upon a presupposition: namely, that in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead the history of God has cut through the history of this world at a single point, 'perpendicularly from above'. The movement whose power and significance has been unveiled in the resurrection of Jesus is a divine movement. The wholly other, eternal life of God has been revealed. That the resurrection was 'bodily' means that the profane world has been addressed at the very point of its subjection to the powers of death and destruction. When we know this, we can no longer live as if the laws which govern social relationships have an independent validity and significance. They have already been set aside in principle. In the light of the resurrection, we can no longer live under the illusions that we can overcome the world but we also know that God can and will. We live in hope of the coming Kingdom."
- Bruce McCormack,
Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 198-199.
3 comments:
The Divine is not, nor ever will be the Ruler of the human world, because the Divine is not on the outside of the world, or the outside of anyone in the world. The Divine must be understood to BE at the inside of the world, and at the inside of everyone in the world. The Divine must be accepted As the Ruler of the heart, and the mind, and the body, such that the sin-filled selfish heart, and mind, and body, ceases to be the false ruler of the heart, and the mind, and the body, and the active life of the human individual.
The Kingdom of God is neither in nor of the merely human world. But the Kingdom Of God is, or must be established within the heart, and the mind, and the body, and the active life of every human individual, in this moment and every future moment.
obviously the intrinsic capacity to thus live a fully comprehensive Right Life has nothing whatsoever to do with the presumed Christ "event" or the presumed "resurrection" of Jesus.
Precisely when and where did this presumed "event" occur?
What are you precisely and altogether?
@Frederick, surely God is at the heart of the world, but God is not the heart of the world. God and the world both exist. Creation and everything within it is possessed of its own being, which is contingent upon God as creature, but exists independently of the existence of God.
And I'm not fiddling with the rest of your comment. You seem to want a very high role for human agency, disconnected from actual particular events in history, but in fact we are saved and freed in Christ, as God recreates us in every moment through the Spirit. Scandalous, I know.
@Kait, great quote. It's always nice to have these bits of clarity pulled out of Barth and tied together neatly.
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