Barth on the Power of God

Christianity does not work the way most people think. That includes Christians. Don't worry, I'm not saying I'm part of some splinter group that discovered the secret to knowing God or that Christians need some special message from me to finally arrive or anything at all like that. Please see "Why Reimagining Paul is Necessary" and "8 Truths from Paul's Actual Gospel" for more about that.

I'm reading Karl Barth's commentary on Romans, first published in 1919, which was said to have dropped on the religious scene "like a bombshell on the theologians' playground" (Karl Adam, cited in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epistle_to_the_Romans_(Barth_book)). Barth studied with the German liberals (note: liberalism in theology is not directly equatable with liberalism in modern politics). Theology and biblical studies had been moving for some time into a very human-centered enterprise with little room for supernatural or revealed things.

Barth came along and said some radical stuff, stuff that was conservative but in a new way (starting a movement called Neo-Orthodoxy). God is not evident from the world of nature. Reason is not capable of deducing God's existence. God is free in God's nature to become weak and to save human beings through that weakness. The human situation is complicated and difficult and theology need not be easy or simple. Complex problems suggest complex solutions. He reasserted Kierkegaard's point that there us an "infinite qualitative distinction" between time and eternity. We are much further from God than we think. And God is not a man simply with greater capabilities. The gulf between God's nature and ours is immense, unfathomable, and in fact: infinite. Therefore, unless God makes himself known to us directly, we cannot know him. And so, God did that, by becoming one of us. Christ is God's Word to us. If we have seen Christ, we have seen God. And God did still more, coming down even further in the Spirit and communicating Christ to our inner person mysteriously. God speaks and it is only in his speaking that we find Gospel truth.

So, when Barth tackles the programmatic verses of the book of Romans—the verses in which Paul states his theme—we can be sure his commentary will be surprising, not what we might expect, and radical.

Romans 1:16-17

For I am not ashamed of the gospel,

for it is the power of God for salvation

to everyone who believes,

to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

For in it [the] righteousness of God is revealed

from faith to faith;

as it is written:

"BUT THE RIGHTEOUS ONE WILL LIVE BY FAITH."

—Romans 1:16-17 NASB

In this essay, I am focusing on Barth's contemplation on two phrases specifically: "I am not ashamed of the Gospel" and "it is the power of God."

Some of Barth's critics accused him of being deliberately obtuse in his commentary, of feigning a kind of pseudo-intellectualism. I can understand their complaint. I made the mistake of starting his commentary in Romans 6 instead of reading from the beginning. I did not understand what I was reading.

Quite often biblical commentaries define words and phrases, cross-reference other biblical authors and sayings, and add in a few historical and sociological tidbits. Then the commentator restates in different words what he or she thinks the biblical writer was talking about. Much commentary is simply a matter of defining and rephrasing the Bible.

Not so with Barth. He interacts with the ideas expressed on the deepest level possible. He grapples with the questions being asked and the answers being given. And he presses on with questions and contemplations until he feels he understands the Gospel in what is being said. When it comes to Paul, Barth's assumption is that we have here a great mind steeped not only in theological learning (from Judaism, prior to knowing Christ) but also a mind which had received greater revelation directly from Christ than almost anyone.

Paul would not think of God as a more powerful human being. Jewish speculation about the nature of God in Paul's time was quite complex. Paul would have seen God as Omnipotent, Ultimate, Infinite, beyond all human ability to comprehend.

That is the place Barth is coming from when he reads Paul saying, "I am not ashamed of the Gospel for it is the power of God."

Not Ashamed

Barth begins by saying that the Gospel does not compete with other religions and philosophies:

The Gospel neither requires men to engage in the conflict of religions or the conflict of philosophies, nor does it compel them to hold themselves aloof from these controversies. In announcing the limitation of the known world by another that is unknown, the Gospel does not enter into competition with the many attempts to disclose within the known world some more or less unknown and higher form of existence and to make it accessible to men.

The comment may seem strange. How does Barth derive this from the saying "I am not ashamed of the Gospel"? Barth is asking the question: why does Paul bring up being ashamed of the Gospel?

Well, what is the Gospel? It is the message that God has appeared as Jesus Christ and he has saved us by becoming one of us so that we might become like him. He died and he was raised so that we would die and be raised with him.

There was plenty there for Paul’s rivals to mock and ridicule. Hey, Paul, I thought there was only one God. Jesus, the criminal? That’s who you put your faith in? You’re letting the Gentiles in? Or from the Roman side: hey, you reject all of our gods and then you anger the synagogue leaders too? Just who is on your side, Paul?

In the end, the world was not on Paul’s side. As far as we know, he was executed in the reign of Nero by beheading.

But the key thing Barth sees Paul thinking—and I believe he is right—is that God does not compete directly with the emperor of Rome. Nor does he answer the folly of philosophers and religionists who follow a path other than the Gospel. God wins through weakness, not strength as we think of it. God decreases himself so we may increase. The Gospel is revealed but not triumphant:

The Gospel neither requires men to engage in the conflict of religions or the conflict of philosophies, nor does it compel them to hold themselves aloof from the controversies. . . . The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question-mark against all truths.

Thus, Paul could stand in the square in Athens (Acts 17) and speak to philosophers without needing to argue for or against their philosophy. The Gospel is not a message we sell or convince people to believe. We do not compete with other philosophies. If someone is comfortable in their modern agnostic materialism, we do not need to come up with an argument against modern agnostic materialism. We simply speak words about Christ and the Gospel and it is not our words that convert people. It is what God speaks directly and mysteriously to the hearer that makes the difference.

Paul spoke to them about the Unknown God, a concept already familiar to Athens philosophers. But Barth capitalizes on this, because God is Unknown to all of us! God is beyond knowing. To be more specific, Barth rejected the analogy of being—the idea that we can comprehend God because we are like him, only lesser. Instead, he subscribed the the analogy of faith—any knowledge we have of God is secondary, revealed to us by him and undiscoverable otherwise. God can only be known with the organ of faith (and love).

Paul writes to the city which is the seat of the world's greatest power: Rome. And he is not ashamed of the message he advocates for. No ridicule will defeat him. No superior show of rhetorical skill, philosophical sophistication, nor oratorical deftness will crush his spirit. Barth says:

Nor is it necessary that Paul should take his stand in the midst of the spiritual cosmopolitanism of Rome; though he can, of course, enter the city without shame, and will enter it as a man who has been consoled by the Gospel. God does not need us. Indeed, if he were not God, he would be ashamed of us. We, at any rate, cannot be ashamed of him.

It Is the Power of God

In commenting on Paul's "not ashamed" saying, Barth went in some unexpected directions. He will do the same, surely, when it comes to explicating the "power of God."

We think we understand power, but God's power is ironic, paradoxical—it is weakness.

First, Barth affirms that it really is a kind of power:

The Gospel of the Resurrection is the—power of God, his virtus (Vulgate), the disclosing and apprehending of his meaning. His effective pre-eminence over all gods.

Unlike other gods, the one true God's nature does not arise from nature. Nature arises from him:

Therefore the power of God can be detected neither in the world of nature nor in the souls of men. It must not be confounded with any high, exalted force, known or knowable. The power of God is not the most exalted of observable forces, nor is it either their sum or their fount. Being completely different, it is the KRISIS of all power, that by which all power is measured, and by which it is pronounced to be both something and—nothing, nothing and—something. It is that which sets all these powers in motion and fashions their eternal rest.

The Gospel is a kind of power, but totally unlike any other power known or knowable. It is the power of the Without End, the Omnipotent, the Infinite One.

Second, Barth clarifies again how unlike the power of Rome is God's power. Barth warns us concerning man-made religious traditions being taken too seriously. Though it is necessary to have traditions and to invent processes for community building in Christian churches, these are not the Gospel. They are like the words we use to express the Gospel—void until God invests them with meaning by his direct revelation. But when the churches insist their traditions are divinely revealed, Barth says:

If this be persisted in, there emerges, instead of the community of Christ, Christendom, an ineffective peace-pact or compromise with that existence which, moving with its own momentum, lies on this side of resurrection. Christianity would then have lost all relation with the power of God.

Barth's warning is clear. When the churches engage in worldly power, we get Constantine and Charlemagne, crusades and inquisitions, the monstrous human capacity to take and harm disguised insidiously as a path of salvation, as a way to God. God's power is unconventional to humans, backwards, unconcerned with competition because God has no competition:

If men must have their religious needs satisfied, if they must surround themselves with comfortable illusions about their knowledge of God and particularly about their union with him,—well, the world penetrates far deeper into such matters than does a Christianity which misunderstands itself, and of such a "gospel" we have good cause to be ashamed. Paul, however, is speaking of the power of the UNKNOWN God, of—"Things which eye saw not and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man." Of such a Gospel he has no cause to be ashamed.

The Gospel is not a set of comfortable illusions we surround ourselves with. It is not a Gospel designed from our needs by us. It is a Gospel that meets our actual needs as God knows them to be. It is a kind of power we can receive but not comprehend. It is true power, something we have not experienced and do not see in nature or society. Those powers are derivative, fleeting, and filled with deception.

The one Power able to make reality is the same Power able to become weak to save the weak. It is the condemnation of human power, the redemption of nature's destructive power, the hidden power that moves all things. That is what Paul means by "power of God."

Concluding Thoughts

The Gospel of Christ does not require defenders. It is not built from the bottom up, as if it proceeded from the spiritual needs of human beings, becoming an answer to the questions raised by men and women. The Gospel came down from heaven in the person of Christ. Rather than answering spiritual needs, the Gospel questions our very being and all that we think we know.

We do not deduce the Gospel. It is apprehended by God speaking to our spirits, not by reason. When expressed in words, the words themselves are not the Gospel. Barth calls them a void, a nothing, words that are an assumption, not a proof. They become proven only to the individual who believes the words because God has spoken them mysteriously and supernaturally to the inner person.

The Gospel is not like the power of Rome, which assimilated other religions and cultures and defeated them with the power of life and death. The Gospel is God in his weakness revealing undiscoverable truth out of the void. The Word of God, Christ, comes to us and we know him. That is the Gospel. Rome conquers. Christ delivers. Rome fights. Christ submits. Rome burns. Christ cures. Rome is the power of man. Christ is the love of God.