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.

The Good News means we can stop lying to ourselves. The sweet sound of amazing grace saves us from the necessity of self-deception. It keeps us from denying that though Christ was victorious, the battle with lust, greed and pride still rages within us. As a sinner who has been redeemed, I can acknowledge that I am often unloving, irritable, angry and resentful with those closest to me. When I go to church I can leave my white hat at home and admit I have failed. God not only loves me as I am, but also knows me as I am... I can accept ownership of my poverty and powerlessness and neediness. (Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, p.23)

This has been one of the most freeing realizations ever, for me.  Without this understanding, the gospel slowly stops being good news, I think.

I remember trying to motivate myself to talk about the gospel with others, while struggling with sin myself, and trying to hide it from myself and from everybody else... It felt horrible, hypocritical...

With this understanding I find in me a freedom to accept that while I am being mended by the grace of God in some broken places, my eyes are also being opened to greater brokenness within me, and the gospel keeps becoming gooder and gooder news by the minute - for me.

Very grateful...

Olympic marathon gold medalist Samuel Wanjiru died early Monday from injuries sustained after jumping from the balcony of his Nyahururu home in central Kenya, a senior police official said.

Wanjiru jumped from the second-floor of his home late Sunday after his wife caught him in the company of another woman, said Jasper Ompati, a police official in Nyahururu.

Wanjirus wife, Tereza Njeri, and another woman were taken to the police station to give statements but were not considered suspects, Ompati said. The death remains under investigation, he said.

Njeri, who lives in Nairobi, returned home unexpectedly to find the two together, Ompati said. Wanjiru is believed to have jumped after his wife locked him inside a bedroom on the second floor, making it impossible for him to leave, he said.

Wanjiru achieved worldwide fame when he became Kenyas first Olympic marathon champion at the Beijing Games in 2008.

via CNN.com.

Barth CD I/2 10:02 am

"our faith in Jesus consists in our recognition & admitting... & accepting ... that everything has actually been done for us in Jesus"

2:37 pm

"It is the characteristically pious element in the pious effort to reconcile Him to us which [is] an abomination to God"

2:53 pm

"sin is always unbelief. And unbelief is always man's faith in himself"