Shivamma stands in front of her house, braiding her little girl's hair. Her feet are bare, her sari is simple, and she is rail thin, but she speaks to visitors with boldness. She is the face of the new Christianity in India. Shivamma's home is nestled inside a concrete storm sewer discarded by the factory where she and her husband work. The neighborhood, hidden in an overgrown back lot, consists of huge pipes lined up like mobile homes. Her family of four lives within 84 square feet.

For a Dalit and a woman, Shivamma is doing well. In traditional Hindu thinking, Dalits are not quite human, lacking the right to enter the temple, read, or eat with members of other castes. A person who touches a Dalit must immediately purify himself. (One church planter notes the awful exception: "When it comes to social life, they are untouchable. For rape, they are touchable.")

To be Dalit is much worse than being poor, for no matter how much education or wealth a Dalit accumulates, he or she remains polluted, a shame on the face of the earth. Dalits are like biblical lepers, except that in mainstream Indian culture, they cannot be healed. "Not even God can save them from pollution," the Catholic Dalit advocate A. Maria notes sarcastically.

But although Shivamma comes from generations of people accustomed to bowing and disappearing, she does not cringe any more. She came to the pipe village as a new bride 11 years ago, seeking to escape the jobless poverty of her home village. She and her husband together make $5 a day, more than most Dalits.

For three years she was barren.

Then, a young Dalit Christian named Bangarraju (most Dalits are known by a single name) came to Shivamma's home to pray for her. "I didn't know why he came or to whom he prayed. I thought Jesus was one of the gods." She conceived and gave birth to a son, and later had a second child, a girl. When her daughter was three months old, the girl became severely jaundiced, passing blood. Bangarraju came to them and prayed again, and the daughter was healed.

"I realized that Jesus is the living God," Shivamma told Christianity Today.

"We used to drink and every day we would fight, fight, fight. Jesus Christ brought peace to our family. I have no fear, because I have come to know the living God. I trust him."

via Christianity Today.

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.

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...

Here's a clear proclamation (CD I.1 §4.3):

God was with us, with us His enemies, with us who were visited and smitten by His wrath. God was with us in all the reality and fulness with which He does what He does.  He was with us as one of us. His Word became flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood.  His glory was seen here in the depths of our situation, and the full depths of our situation were disclosed for the first time when illumined then and there by the Lord's glory, when in His Word He came down to the lowest parts of the earth (Eph 4:9), in order that there and in that way He might rob death of its power and bring life and immortality to light (2 Tim 1:10). This happened, and this is what the Old Testament as a word of prophecy and the New Testament as a word of fulfilment both proclaim as having happened, as having happened conclusively, totally and sufficiently.

Word.