Monday, 25 April 2016

Dogmatics in Outline,
Karl Barth, SCM, 2012, page 67

Following on from the extract from Karl Barth's "Dogmatics in Outline" from last year, it is interesting to see what Barth means by the act of confessing Yeshua as Saviour and Lord.

When the Christian Church confesses Jesus Christ as Saviour and the Servant of G-d for us, for all men, also for the mighty majority of those who have no direct connexion with the people Israel, then it does not confess Him although He was a Jew (as if this 'Jewishness' in Jesus were a pudendum, which we had to ignore!). Nor can the view that we believe in Jesus Christ, who was just an Israelite by accident, but who might quite as well have sprung from another nation. No, we must strictly consider that Jesus Christ, in whom we believe, whom we Christians out of the heathen call our Saviour and praise as the consummator of G-d's work on our behalf - He was of necessity a Jew. We cannot be blind to this fact; it belongs to the concrete reality of G-d's work and of His revelation ... The man who is ashamed of Israel is ashamed of Jesus Christ and therefore of his own existence.

At Barth sees it, this is an existential matter - if we believe in Yeshua, we must believe in Him as He is, not as we might wish He were or were not, and that that includes His ethnicity and people.