MORE DEEP THOUGHTS FROM THEOLOGIAN KARL BARTH: GOD’S SELF REVELATION OF HIS MAJESTY But it is also necessary to make clear, …what is contained in the conception Majesty, …if it is to be applied to God. It is easy to misunderstand the Confession of faith, …as if by enumerating a number of attributes, …such as the eternal, infinite, etc. …which are assumed to be perfectly clear, …it seeks to offer a universally intelligible philosophy of the Absolute, …to which the doctrine of the Trinity …is in some amazing way to be attached. On this view the name Father, Son and Holy Spirit, …is just a special predicate of a subject, …with which we are already familiar, …namely the Absolute. The traditional practice, which goes far back in theology, …of speaking first of Gods essence and attributes, …and only then of the three-in-oneness, …has helped to bring about this misunderstanding. But Gods majesty is to be measured just as little, …by the standard of the human idea of the Absolute, …as Gods personality is to be measured by the standard, …of our view of human personality. The human idea of the Absolute, …which we are accustomed to think of, …as identical with God, is the reflection of the world, …and in the end the disastrous reflection of human personality. Once again, if we had equated this idea with God, …we would have set up the Image of an idol. We have not to draw our knowledge of who God is, …from what we think we know about eternity, infinity, …omnipotence and invisibility, …as conceptions which bound our thought. On the contrary, we have to draw our knowledge of eternity, …infinity, omnipotence, and invisibility from what we can know …about God, from what God has said to us about Himself. If we choose to take the first way, …or the various ways into which this first way is generally divided: …the famous via negationis, the via eminentiae, and via causalitatis, …we could as easily conclude with the definition God is nothing, …as with the second one God is everything, …or the third God is the One in everything. And with it all, what we have defined, would not be God. On the contrary, we would have defined in one way or another, …the essence of that which is not God, …we would have defined the creature, …and in the end, as Ludwig Feuerbach has irrefutably shown, …the essence of humanity itself. If we do not wish to end by really defining ourselves, …when we think that we are defining God, …we can only take the second way, …and therefore hold fast to the incomprehensible majesty, …in which God meets us In His revelation, …the majesty of His person as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. His majesty consists in His being the archetypal Person, i.e. truly, really and genuinely a person. As a divine Person, He has freedom over Himself …and over all things, as we saw above. But as a Person, …in distinction from those images of our Imagination, ...He is One Who knows and wills, Who acts and speaks, Who as an I calls me Thou, …and Whom I can call Thou, JAH” in return. This is the true name of God declared by Him Himself, …and in it we must seek also the whole mystery of His majesty. Apart from this name, …it would have to remain completely hidden from us.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 20:22:17 +0000
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