Jesus Christ's Self-Attestation

³⁹ Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” ⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. ⁴¹ And because of his words many more became believers.
⁴² They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.” - John 4:39-42

As I continue my foray into Church Dogmatics IV, I am deluged by things I want to write about.  But something jumped out at me today that both reminded me of the above scripture in John's Gospel and of the Pentecostal emphasis on the need for a personal encounter with God.  

In the early pages of the section "The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country" (p.157ff in the T&T Clark Edition), Barth begins his threefold division of redemption that he has just spent 150-plus pages "introducing."  For Barth, the incarnate Son of God cannot be abstracted from the event of atonement.  The incarnation of the Son is the atonement.  But Barth does say that the event of atonement can be examined on three different levels: the God who reconciles, man who is reconciled, and God-and-man in reconciliation.  He begins his exploration of the God who reconciles with an examination of how Jesus appears in the New Testament, particularly the Synoptic Gospels.

In the Synoptics,

"He [Jesus] is not simply a better man, a more gifted, a more wise or noble or pious, in short a greater man.  But as against all other men and their differences we have in the person of this man One who is their Lord and Lawgiver and Judge." (p.160)

Barth goes on,

"The New Testament community does not merely think, but lives and acts in the knowledge and on the presupposition that in this man 'dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily' (Col. 2:9)" (p.160)

After spending some time reinforcing this, particularly in his own context, deeply important point, Barth makes some comments that are both very typical of his theology of revelation but also very significant for we Pentecostals who see ourselves as above all a missional community of Christ.

"He is to them [i.e., to the New Testament community] the Christ, the Kyrios, the Son of Man and the Son of God, the One who is absolutely different and exalted, even before they describe Him in this way.  And when they do describe Him in this way, they appeal in some sense to Himself - that He Himself continually attests to Himself as such.  And in relation to others they count on it happening that they too may accept - not their own representation and appraisal of a man honoured by them - but the Word of Jesus, His self-attestation of His majesty, of his unity with God...

"When the New Testament attests Him to be such, it speaks of His resurrection from the dead.  Only secondarily, and in this way, does it speak of the records of it.  And in relation to others His witnesses expect that the same Holy Spirit who has revealed this to them will not be silent to others." (pp.162-163, emphasis mine)

Within these observations by Barth, the first thing that can be seen is Barth's theology of scripture as a "witness to the Word of God" rather than the Word of God itself (or, himself).  The New Testament, for Barth, is the authoritative collection of documents by the community of Jesus' original witnesses.  But it is not the Word of God.  It is a witness to the Word, and by the Spirit can become the Word of God afresh.  But while the text is authoritative, ultimate sovereignty is not in the text but in the God who is witnessed to in the text and who is Lord over the text.  The Spirit witnesses to Jesus who shows us the Father.  Only God himself can be the Word of God.  Only God can reveal God.  Revelation is a trinitarian event.  And so the Bible becomes the Word of God only in the power of the Spirit of God, and only as it reveals Jesus. 

As Pentecostal Christians, we are people of the Spirit.  We believe that the Spirit of God is sovereign, active, and powerful.  We also believe that salvation is not simply adherence to particular doctrinal formulas or participation in particular sacramental rituals.  Doctrine matters, and the sacraments are beginning to be more deeply appreciated, but nothing takes the place of personally encountering Jesus Christ by faith.  Like the Samaritans, everyone needs to "hear for themselves" the voice of Christ by the Spirit.  And Barth reminds us not only that this is so, but that we can trust Jesus and the Spirit to introduce themselves to those who don't yet know their Lord.  He does so, first and foremost, through the Bible, but also through faithful preaching and witnessing.  But it is not ultimately us who reveal Jesus.  The self-revelation of God only happens when people personally meet this God.  And they meet this God when he introduces himself in Christ and by the Spirit.

Faith, Love, Hope, Eschatology, and Life in the Spirit

I am continuing my excursion through Church Dogmatics IV/1 "The Doctrine of Reconciliation."  And today I had an interesting dialog with a believer in my town who I never would have thought would show up in this blog.

I have a believing friend who has become deeply entrenched in the movement known as Hebrew Roots.  If you're not familiar with that movement, it is basically a modern day version of the Galatian heresy.  Adherents of the group believe that there is really not supposed to be anything called "the Christian church," and that gentile believers in Jesus (Yeshua) are supposed to live their lives according to Torah (the law of Moses).  Our conversation today went as most conversations do between him and me.  He said that Christians are inconsistent in adhering to the "moral law" while not observing things like the Sabbath.  I tried, unsuccessfully I think, to explain that the Christian has died and risen with Christ and thus lives in the eschaton (I didn't use that word), and thus are not bound by law.  We live by the law of love because that is how the kingdom of God works.  We no longer need a schoolmaster.  We live, through Christ, in the age to come, where the "forever" of the Mosaic covenant no longer holds.  He wasn't convinced.  Oh well. This, however, showed me something that is integral to New Testament Christianity that both Karl Barth and the best examples of Pentecostal Christianity have managed to understand and articulate in their own ways. 

In his massive work on the pneumatology of the apostle Paul, God's Empowering Presence, Gordon Fee repeatedly makes the case that the presence of the Spirit in the church meant for Paul that believers were already living in the age to come.  In fact, Fee regularly calls the Spirit the "eschatological Spirit."  In his own highly informed and scholarly manner, Fee is articulating exegetically something that is inherent to Pentecostal understanding of the Spirit.  From it's very beginning, the Pentecostal movement understood its reception of the Spirit and the gifts as an eschatological phenomenon.  They Spirit of the Last Days was being poured out to prepare the church and the world for the return of Christ.  Whereas the early Pentecostal leaders may have missed the eschatological significance of Christ's resurrection, and while they may have primarily been working within a dispensational framework, the connection between the reception of the charismatic Spirit and the age to come was not missed.  The pouring out of the Spirit meant that the end of the ages was, at the very least, immanent. 

In Church Dogmatics IV/1, in the section titled "The Being of Man in Jesus Christ" (pp.92-122 in the T&T Clark Edition), Barth applies the fulfillment of the covenant which has taken place in Christ alone to the existence of the believer.  Barth is insistent that salvation is entirely in Christ alone, and he means this in a far more radical sense that traditional Reformed theology.  For Barth, salvation happens there in Christ not here in me.  In traditional Christian theology - Reformed, Pentecostal, or otherwise - salvation is something that is accomplished both there in Christ and here in me.  Even Reformed theology speaks of the application of redemption in the believer by the Spirit.  But for Barth, he has already spent an entire section arguing that salvation has happened entirely in Christ.  He has fulfilled the covenant.  He has been rejected for us.  He is the elect man.  The covenant is fulfilled.  Man is now saved.  And, which will be discussed more in upcoming blogs, what the Spirit does is not to cause salvation to happen here in me, but to bring about realization of the salvation that has happened there in Jesus.  For Barth, the Spirit doesn't so much bring Jesus to me as he brings me to Jesus.  I like that distinction.  (And time does not permit me to rabbit trail into Barth's eschatological view of Christ's resurrection, which has caused un-careful readers to think Barth denied the historical nature of the resurrection.)

But in his section, "The Being of Man in Jesus Christ," Barth makes quite an interesting argument for how the salvation in Christ works within the believer.  He uses Paul's threefold list from 1 Corinthians 13 of faith, hope and love.  However, for his purposes, Barth reorders them as Faith, Love, and Hope.  Faith is, naturally enough, the realization of the reality of Christ and his atonement for me.  This is Barth's section on justification.  Then there is Love, which for Barth refers to obedience to Christ's commands, or his "direction," and is Barth's treatment of sanctification.  What is most interesting, however, is Barth's treatment of Hope.

Hope, for Barth, is eschatological.  And our hope is not in some disembodied beatific vision, but in an eternal service to and partnership with God.  It is the closest thing Barth with get to synergism.  Our salvation is entirely monergistic for Barth, but the life God saves us to is an eternal life of partnership with God.  This is a partnership in eternity, but which spills back and makes all the things we do today and tomorrow hope filled actions, too.  And this too, like Faith and Love, is a work of the Spirit, who makes us realize the truth of who we are in Christ.

For my Galatian friend, our salvation in Christ has almost nothing to do with eschatology.  Sure, maybe he keeps us out of hell and will rule from Jerusalem during the millennium.  But other than that, other than some eternal tomorrow, "Yeshua" has not brought us the kingdom or ushered us into the eschaton.  For Pentecostals, Jesus is the Spirit Baptizer, and the Spirit he pours out on us is the Spirit of the age to come - both equipping us to be witnesses to him as we usher in the end and also placing us into the kingdom that began with Christ but has not yet been consummated.  For Barth, Christ has changed the entire world.  The world just doesn't know it yet.  He has raised man from the dead and justified him before God.  Man is now God's servant and partner.  That is, he one day will be - and that means he already is.

Karl Barth, "the World," and Evangelism

I am continuing to take a break from my study of Hell in Barth's though, but look for a third installment soon(ish).  If you missed parts 1 and 2, they can be read here and here.  For now I am foraying into volume IV of the Church Dogmatics, the Doctrine of Reconciliation.

The Pentecostal movement, from the very beginning, has been a missionary movement.  Whenever Spirit-empowered missions and the planting of indigenous churches is lost from view, I think that the true essence of Pentecostal Christianity is lost.  The tongues, the healings, the miracles, and the exuberant worship, are simply pieces of this larger goal: the church, in the power of the Spirit, preaching the gospel to the ends of the earth, that every nation, tribe, and tongue may hear, believe, and so be saved.  So the preaching of the gospel is central to Pentecostalism.  So is the belief that hearing the gospel and responding to the gospel is needful for redemption in Christ.  I will not go so far as to say that the early Pentecostals were uniform in their views on the eternal fate of those who have never heard the gospel.  They may or may not have been.  I don't know.  But I know that what was central to the Pentecostal vision was the "lost-ness" of the world and the need people had to hear about Jesus.  If Barth's theology cannot speak to this missions mindset, then it is a poor companion to Pentecostal experience.

In Church Dogmatics IV/1, "The Doctrine of Reconciliation," Barth begins his book with the assertion that the Christian message can be summed up in the name Emmanuel, "God With Us."  He goes on to make clear that this "God With Us" is true, not because of us, but because of God.  Reconciliation with God is based on covenant.  God covenanted with mankind.  It was his purpose in creating us.  He created us to love us, but we broke faith with him.  We disobeyed and cancelled our "right" to the covenant relationship with God, but since God had already determined to have us, he kept both sides of the covenant, and he did this through Jesus Christ.  In Jesus Christ, God and man are reconciled.  And this is where Barth's implicit universalism appears (not so much in this section of the Dogmatics as in the logic).

But universalist or no, Barth is making a valuable point.  Redemption Proper, that is, redemption itself, takes place "over there" in Christ, not so much "over here" in us.  We have forfeited the covenant, but outside of us and on our behalf, God in Christ has restored and maintained it.  Later on, in volume IV/4, Barth will explain Christian experience of the Spirit (which he calls "baptism in the Holy Spirit") as being brought into, or made aware of, what has happened for us in Christ.  A strong case can be made from Barth's thought that what we generally mean by "being saved" doesn't take place until this conversion, or Spirit baptism.  But because Barth wants to downplay the subjectivism which he saw as the great enemy to the gospel, Barth threw all his weight on the actuality of the redemption that happened in Jesus.  Salvation really happened when Jesus lived, died, and rose again.  And because Barth rejected a classical Calvinistic view of "limited atonement" (Jesus only died for the elect), actual salvation has happened for the whole world and for every man in it already in Jesus.  He didn't make salvation possible, he saved us.  But what does this do with the need to preach the gospel to people, and to actually believe it ourselves?...

On pages 70-78 of Church Dogmatics IV/1 (T&T Clark edition), Barth spends time exegeting two important passages for his understanding of the gospel, John 3:16 and 2 Corinthians 5:19.

In the first passage, of course, we are told that God has "loved the world" by sending Jesus Christ, and for Barth this love is effective.  God has loved the world, which is to say, he has kept the covenant on behalf of the world in Christ.  And Barth emphasizes that, in John, "the world" is the wicked world.  God has loved the wicked world in Christ.  The whole thing is loved.  Is there any distinction then between believers and unbelievers?  Yes, it seems there is:

"Those who believe on the Son are the members of the cosmos who, while they necessarily participate as such in its opposition, and are therefore subject to perishing and have forfeited eternal life, in the sending of the Son and therefore in the self-offering of God can and must recognise [sic] God as God, and His will as a will of love, a will to rescue and to save...

"They are those who without being in any way different from others are under the forceful permission and command to affirm God and the will of God as it has been revealed to them.  This is not because, as distinct from others, they are disposed and able of themselves, but because God is too strong for them...

"What happens to them, and as such is only theirs, applies to the whole world, as we see from the verse which immediately follows [i.e. John 3:17], and is connected to v. 16 by a "gar" [Grk. for "for"]: "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved" (v. 17).  Within the world, and therefore as a witness directed and appointed to it, there are men who belong to it, yet do not perish but have everlasting life.  In the setting up of this witness within the world the atonement is shown to be an atonement for the world." (p.73, emphasis mine)

So Barth's understanding of the distinction between believers and unbelievers is not one of righteousness (we are all rebels), or of personal qualities (if anything, we believe because we're weaker than our neighbors).  Those who believe are those who have actually entered into what is the real situation of the whole world.  The atonement that has taken place in Jesus really is an atonement for the whole world.  Using Barth's logic of sin and damnation as "nothingness" and "absurdity," then, I would conclude that Barth is saying that when we believe we enter into truth as opposed to continuing in the lie of sin and lost-ness.  Our salvation in Christ is true, and our continuing in an unreconciled state is a ridiculous lie.

And what is fascinating and beautiful about Barth's though here is the role believers thus take.  Because salvation is for the world, to be a believer is to be a witness.  This is evident from the above quotes, but comes out even more forcefully in Barth's exegesis of 2 Corinthians 5:19.  In typical Barthian fashion, and in keeping with his view of reconciliation in Christ, Barth takes the apostle Paul's statement that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself" and "not counting their sins against them" with utmost seriousness.  God has reconciled the world!  He has not counted our sin!  He has made us righteous in Jesus!  So where does preaching the gospel come into this?  In the "ministry of reconciliation":

"Between the apostle and the rest of the world there is the decisive difference that he has eyes and ears for the atonement which has been made, and therefore for the conversion of the world to God, for the new thing which has come and therefore for the passing of the old, whereas the world is still blind and deaf to it. . .But it is not this difference, and the tension of it, and the dynamic of this tension, which makes him an apostle.  What moves him in this difference, what prevents him from evading the tension as a kind of private person reconciled with God, what forces him to make it his own, to bear it in his own person, is the fact that what has come about for him in Christ as his reconciliation with God has come about for him for the sake of the world." (p.77, emphasis mine)

So for Barth, the salvation of the individual in Christ is part of the bigger whole: the real salvation that has taken place once and for all in Jesus Christ for every single person.  The individual's salvation is the actualization of this salvation, the entering by grace into a fact that is (potentially) true of all.  But when we enter into this fact, the joyful burden of being a witness to the world of it's salvation which has taken place in Christ becomes ours as well.  And in this way, Barth becomes a happy ally to the Pentecostal cause of missions and world evangelization.  Glory to God in the highest, and to his Son who has made salvation real.  Amen.