Barth CD I/2 9:22 am

"Christians are sinners and... the Church is a Church of sinners... justified sinners... sanctified sinners"

9:25 am

"revelation is the removal of all religion"

9:28 am

"work is faith & faith is work"

9:36 am

"All things considered, the Christian life, the life of the children of God, consists in these two concepts of love & praise"

9:38 am

"The Christian life begins with love. It also ends with love. If we did not begin to love, we would not have come to faith"

9:40 am

"As Christians, we are continually asked about love, and in all that we can ever do or not do, it is the decisive question"

He fell in love with his first wife because she was sincere and eager to please.

His second wife, a cousin, was irresistible because she did everything he wished and nothing he didn't.

"That alone made me love her."

His third wife won him because she submitted to his every request.

"I saw her, I liked her. I went to her parents and asked for her hand in marriage."

Wife No. 4 was very obedient. So was wife No. 5. Wife No. 6, the same. As were wives 7 and 8 and 9 and …

Well, by then — it was the late 1980s — things had taken off for Bello Maasaba, an Islamic faith healer in this city in Niger state. He went from a wedding every few months to one every few weeks.

All told, the 87-year-old has married 107 women, which, even in a society with a tradition of polygamy, is on the high side. The Nigerian government is not amused. Neither are Islamic authorities in the state.

But he's still marrying, every time Miss Right comes along. He now has 86 wives, the youngest 19 and the oldest 64. Nine have died and 12 he divorced (for disobedience).

via latimes.com.

Barth, CD I/2, p. 430-431:

The fellow-man who is unaware of his true plight, the fellow-man to whom we can look and about whom we can concern ourselves, above all the fellow-man who helps us confirm and enhance us in the role of benefactor, mentor and ameliorator: this fellow-man does not constitute any serious problem, and any headaches which he may incidentally cause will not be mortal. But this in the last resort not at all disconcerting fellow-man is not our neighbour in the sense of the second commandment.  He is not the one who, sent and authorised by God, shows mercy upon us. He is lacking in the most important quality, in which alone he could do so, an actual similarity to the crucified Jesus Christ. At least, he is so in our eyes and in his relation to us. That is why he is not at all disconcerting.  That is why we do not experience any serious unwillingness in relation to him.  But that is also why he cannot help us seriously. This fellow-man will not summon us to the praise of God. Only afflicted, sinful fellow-man can do that.  Only this man is my neighbour in the sense of the second commandment.  But this neighbour will cause me a really mortal headache.  I mean, he will seriously give me cause involuntarily to repudiate his existence and in that way to put myself in serious danger. In face of this neighbour I certainly have to admit to myself that I would really prefer to exist in some other way than in this co-existence. I would prefer this because from this neighbour a shadow falls inexorably and devastatingly upon myself. The wretched fellow-man beside me simply reveals to me in his existence my own misery. For can I see him in the futility and impotence of his attempt to live, without at once mutatis mutandis recognising myself? If I really see him, if as propinquissimus he is brought into such close contact with me that, unconfused by any intersecting feelings which may influence me, I can only see his misery, how can it be otherwise? This is the criterion: if it is otherwise, if I can still see him without seeing myself, then for all the direct sympathy I may have for him, for all the zeal and sacrifice I may perhaps offer him, I have not really seen him. He remains at root that in no way disconcerting fellow-man. He is still not my neighbour. The neighbour shows me that I myself am a sinner.

This passage, which really needs its greater context to fully explain itself, is so characteristic of Barth's style, at least to the extent I've read him so far.

It's a strange new world...

This bit of Barth, it seems to me, has something to say to the question of why short-term missions are taking off, while local dying neighborhoods continue to experience neglect.

After some beautiful work on the neighbor in the parable, Barth considers the question of our responsibility to one who is "in great suffering and therefore in need of help, a fellow-man whom we have to love by bringing the help which he needs." CD I/2, p.427-428:

If we are to keep strictly to the biblical witness to revelation we cannot answer this question with a doctrine which is roughly as follows: That suffering fellow-man in need of help directs the children of God to the task which God has appointed for them.  God does not will the many griefs and sufferings and burdens under which we men have to sigh.  He wills their removal. He wills a better world.  Therefore, we, too, should will this better world, and a true worship of God consists in our cooperation in the removal of these sufferings.  Therefore our neighbour in his distress is a reminder to us and the occasion and object of our proper worship of God.

This kind of ("religio-social") teaching overlooks too many things and arbitrarily introduces too many things for us to be able to accept it. That God does not will the evil under which we men have to suffer is true to the extent, but only to the extent, that as His revelation shows, He does not will its cause, the alienation of man from Himself, and the world as fashioned by this alienation, which as such is necessarily a world full of evil.  On the contrary, in drawing man to Himself in Jesus Christ, he inaugurates a new world and causes it to break through.  This work of reconciliation, in the consummation to which Jesus Christ pointed and which He is to fulfil, is the divine removing of the things under which we now see both ourselves and others suffer.  We are not told that we have to cooperate in this removing as such.  We are not told that we have to undertake the amelioration of the world in fulfilment of a divine programme of amelioration.  We are not told that we shall find a neighbour in our fellow-man because his pitiable condition stirs us to do something along these lines. What we are told is that we should love our neighbour by proclaiming to him - not only in word, of course, but in deed - the true amelioration and therefore Jesus Christ.

Our neighbour in the sense of that doctrine of world-amelioration would again mean Law (instead of Gospel first and then as such Law). This is the very perversion which our previous discussion has shown to be untenable.  Even our suffering fellow-man in need of help does not primarily confront us with a task.

Seriously?

Sounds to me like a distinction without a difference, which is itself undermined by how he himself qualifies his assertion ("not only in word, of course, but in deed").

Looking forward to how he sorts this out in his continuing & developing thought.

Barth, CD I/2, p.393:

Often enough we can see in others, and especially in ourselves, that it is possible to be a regular and genuine and serious seeker after God, out of a passionately sincere heart, or a real sense and experience of the many compulsions of life and conscience - only to give it all up when our apparent seriousness is suddenly taken seriously, in a situation in which our seeking could really be a finding... and simply because the God we find, who has let himself be found, is not the One of whom we can joyfully confess that it is Him we have sought. We love Him or think that we love Him at a distance, but we do not love Him near at hand. We prefer to withdraw to that pretended love at a distance. But is not that love unmasked and adjudged as non-love?

Barth, CD I/2 p.390:

At this point I should again like to quote H.F.Kohlbrügge: "The feeling of sin and misery begins and remains in us, the more we are irradiated by the sun of righteousness. Whoso is born of God has his supreme good in God alone; nothing else can satisfy him. Idols must all give place one after the other. But the more the love of God increases in the heart, the more knowledge there is of inability, and, even with the best of wills, unwillingness, to love God the Lord, and to love Him with all the heart and soul and mind and strength. The spirit will not come from the flesh..."

According to Kohlbrügge, there are definite marks of a sorrowful kind by which the children of God can know that the love of God is in them.  These are weeping, groaning, crying, sorrow and concern because in their hearts they find only perversity and hostility, only the love of sin and the world and the things which are seen, because they have no desire at all for God and his love, but a cold, sluggish, hard and stony heart, filled with all kinds of evil considerations and other sinful thoughts. Therefore the children of God must at all points humble themselves before the holiness of God. They must bow beneath His holy law. They must be crushed and broken in respect of the love of God and neighbour. They must be humbled to the very core. They must apply to themselves what the apostle Paul says in the seventh chapter of Romans, especially of the sin which the regenerate find in themselves in the light of God's law. For the fact that they are overwhelmed in this way proves that the love of God is in them."

What he said.