George Hunsinger on Karl Barth (the antidote to my last two posts, below this one): Therefore, if we sinful human beings are to find the truth of our existence, the reality of our salvation, and the ground of our selfhood before God, the basic rule is that we should look away from ourselves to Jesus Christ. “The greater the concentration with which we look at him, the better will be the knowledge that we have of ourselves” (IV/2, 269). We are not to seek knowledge of our salvation by means of introspection or self-examination. We are to look away from ourselves as consistently as possible. “It is a matter of knowing ourselves . . . in Christ,” writes Barth, “and therefore not here in ourselves, but there outside ourselves in this Other who is not identical with me, and with whom I am not, and do not become, identical, but in whose humanity God himself becomes and is and always will be another, a concrete antithesis” (IV/2, 283). Our self-knowledge as the knowledge of who we are in Christ (who stands over against us even in uniting with us) can only occur as we learn to recognize ourselves in him, since “in truth” we are not outside but are so within him that he is our “truest life” (IV/3, 545)
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 02:17:35 +0000
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