the experience of god: being, consciousness, bliss
from the introduction:
This is either an extremely ambitious or an extremely unambitious book. I tend to think it is the latter, but I can imagine how someone might see it quite otherwise. My intention is simply to offer a definition of the word “God,” or of its equivalents in other tongues, and to do so in fairly slavish obedience to the classical definitions of the divine found in the theological and philosophical schools of most of the major religious traditions.
A superb book.
Required reading, I’d say, for there is nothing else quite like it. So much debate around the concept of God is pointless because we haven’t arrived at a common definition of what we’re debating.
DBH:
This is either an extremely ambitious or an extremely unambitious book. I tend to think it is the latter, but I can imagine how someone might see it quite otherwise. My intention is simply to offer a definition of the word “God,” or of its equivalents in other tongues, and to do so in fairly slavish obedience to the classical definitions of the divine found in the theological and philosophical schools of most of the major religious traditions.
seeking & finding
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?
sorrowful marks of 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.