Acts 6:11–14 ESV

Then they secretly instigated men who said, “We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.” And they stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes, and they came upon him and seized him and brought him before the council, and they set up false witnesses who said, “This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law, for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us.”

Stephen, following Jesus.

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.

On the night of March 8 Yasser Makram was on his way home from work, his pick-up truck full of garbage as he turned up the winding dirt road on the edge of Egypts capital, to approach his home in the crowded Cairo slum known popularly as Garbage City. As he inched around a curve, he saw a swarm of people running towards the truck in his rearview mirror. "I didnt know what was happening," he says. But before he could consider the possibilities, the mob had pulled him from the truck. "They demanded to know if I was Christian." Makrams hospital report says the 27-year-old suffered "nerve damage" and "multiple deep wounds and fractures" that night. A long, sinister scar — a knife wound — now cuts across his face, ear to ear. And it will be at least a year before he can drive his garbage truck again. The mob stabbed him in the chest and beat him with pipes, breaking an arm and one of his ribs, before stripping him naked and dragging him, semi-conscious, up a dark and dusty road to the foot of the Citadel, a medieval Islamic fort.

Three months later, no one has been charged with the crime, the police apparently having shown no interest in filing a report while Makram was hospitalized. And Makram has no idea who his attackers were. But he remembers their response to the strangers who finally intervened to help him: "This is a Christian son of a bitch," they said. "Were going to kill him."

via TIME.

Complex argument, hard to represent in a brief extract. Barth, CD I/2, p. 803:

Let us suppose the ideal case. We have a form of teaching which in its origin and first appearance, in spite of and in all its human conditioning, can only be traced back to the faithful and true hearing of the Word of God, so that what it says may be defined as the realization of pure doctrine and as the unadulterated proclamation of the Word of God. Why should we not say so at once, even if we can do so legitimately only in faith? But then the teaching goes beyond the stage of origin and first appearance. It passes from the first mouth to the second. Or it is even stated a second or third time by its first exponent. And even in the ideal case, it inevitably becomes dubious. For there is uncertainty whether this still happens in the originally faithful and true hearing of the Word of God. Perhaps the teacher concerned and the teaching church which follows him and uses his formula are already listening to themselves; to the fine and strong and timely things which they themselves have thought about the matter; to the joyful and pleasant sound which the words in question had in their mouths; to the echo of the approval and applause which they encountered; to the consequences of being publicly committed through speaking in this way to the persuasive power of a rapt congregation which wants to hear again and again what has been so wonderfully stated. Even affirmations, denials, syntheses and reservations which, as made in the original hearing of the Word, were well founded and legitimately impressive and - we will suppose - the purest doctrine, now take on a certain independence, or appear only as facile arguments, useful stones in structures with which, as originating in the Word of God, they had nothing to do, and which perhaps themselves derive from quite another source than the hearing of the Word of God. In short, the equivocal phenomenon of Church proclamation has again developed from what we will suppose was the unequivocally pure doctrine of the beginning. This development cannot be arrested. This is how it has always gone at the crises of Church history. As such, the teaching of the Church is not guaranteed even for a single moment against the possibility of immediately losing what we will suppose is its recently attained purity, and of again becoming something very different from the speech which obediently listens. A formula may be ever so simple, clear and powerful, an exposition and sequence of thoughts may be ever so transparent and compelling, but it is not guaranteed against this risk. It cannot be protected by any personality, however trustworthy, or any fellowship of believers, however faithful. Here at the very centre of its life the Church experiences the fact that it is in the world. Its proclamation begins, as we will suppose, in the Spirit, but immediately and at every point it shows a tendency to end in the flesh.

Later, on p. 807:

At every moment and in every situation the danger threatens that members of the Church may want the Word of God without God, bringing it under their power and understanding, and applying it according to their own good pleasure... No heresy has ever had the original intention of being heresy; it has become so only when and where a first unintended lapse from obedience has not been noted and resisted in time.

Barth, CD I/2, p. 750-751:

The human impossibility of the Church's proclamation consists simply in the impossibility of the attempt to speak of God....

Of God it is impossible to speak... If we speak of Him, we are no longer speaking of Him. In this matter we cannot do what we want to do and we cannot attain what we should like to attain. This is the iron law under which all Church proclamation without exception stands. That what happens here is frailty is far too weak an expression for the real situation. This is not frailty. This is death. This is not difficulty. It is sheer impossibility. What happens here is not something imperfect. Measured by the standard of what is intended, it is simply nothing.

If there is proclamation, if the attempt does not fail, it is just at the point where success is achieved that it can and will be understood, not as human success, but as a divine victory concealed in human failure, sovereignly availing itself of human failure.

Barth, CD I/2, p. 748-749:

If we consider what men are doing in the Church, ourselves or others, it is only by a crude self-deception that we can come to the conclusion that the Word of God is really being preached there. And when we have grown tired of this self-deception, if we still consider men in the Church, we shall arrive at the diametrically opposite but no less arbitrary conclusion, that the Word of God is not being preached in the Church...

What has to happen in order that the proclamation of the church may be the Word of God, and that men in the Church may really proclaim the Word of God, has already happened, as, generally speaking, everything that has to happen in order that the Church may live as the Church of God has already happened. Provision has been made that in the Church men may again and again believe and hope and love, that in it the name of God may be constantly invoked in thankful prayer, that in it the disciples of Jesus may ever and again suffer, and that in it brother may find brother and receive his help.

All that has been provided. No presupposition is required from us. We are not even asked whether we see it all performed and fulfilled by ourselves or others. Our business can only be that of accepting as something which has happened for us and to us that which has already been performed and fulfilled in Jesus Christ in respect of the whole life of the Church. It is always in this acceptance that the Church lives its life as created by Jesus Christ and rooted in him.

The same is true in relation to the proclamation of the Word of God, which is only one of the functions of the Church. It can only be a question of accepting what has already been created and founded in Jesus Christ. It is not we who have to care for the truth and validity of the identification of proclamation in the Church with the Word of God. We have to accept that it is so and allow it to be true.

Because Jesus Christ is risen, because God's revelation and testimonies are therefore given to the Church, it receives and holds His commission, which means that it has Himself in its midst as the Lord of its speaking, the Lord who in and through its speaking bears witness to Himself. Humanly speaking, it is a stark impossibility which stares us in the face - that men should speak what God speaks; but it is one which in Jesus Christ is already overcome. At the hands of those for whom it was in fact an impossibility, it brought as a blasphemer to the cross the One for whom it was not an impossibility, in order that it might be revealed in His resurrection as the new possibility for man, to be imparted by Him to His prophets and apostles and to be conveyed by their witness to the Church.