bits of barth
Barth, CD I/1 12:17 am
"we stand before the fact of heresy. concretely, we stand before the fact of Roman Catholicism..."
"not all human talk is talk about God. it could be and should be. there is no reason in principle why it should not be"
"if the social work of the church as such were to try to be proclamation, it could only become propaganda..."
"God may suddenly be pleased to have Abraham blessed by Melchizedek, or Israel blessed by Balaam or helped by Cyrus"
"He can establish the church anew and directly when and where and how it pleases Him"
"if the question what God can do forces theology to be humble, the question what is commanded of us forces it to concrete obedience"
"God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog"
"proclamation... is always and always will be man's word. when and where it pleases God, it is God's own Word"
"nor can one see in the Asiatic crudities of Bolshevic ideology a rival which is even remotely a match for the Church's proclamation"
"the central factum on which dogmatics focuses will always be quite simply the Church's Sunday sermon of yesterday & tomorrow"
"the simplest proclamation of the Gospel can be proclamation of the truth in the most unlimited sense..." (1)
"... and can validly communicate the truth to the most unsophisticated hearer if God so will" (2)
"without the ambivalence, the liability to misunderstanding, the vulnerability... it could not be real proclamation"
"the Bible is God's Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that He speaks through it"
