#387. Karl har ordet…

”Again, a correct understanding of eternity is reached only if we start from the other side, from the real fellowship between God and the creature, and therefore between eternity and time. This means starting from the incarnation of the divine Word in Jesus Christ. The fact that the Word became flesh undoubtedly means that, without ceasing to be eternity, in its very power as eternity, eternity became time. Yes, it became time. What happens in Jesus Christ is not simply that God gives us time, our created time, as the form of our own existence and world, as is the case in creation and in the whole ruling of the world by God as its Lord. In Jesus Christ it comes about that God takes time to Himself, that He Himself, the eternal One, becomes temporal, that He is present for us in the form of our own existence and our own world, not simply embracing our time and ruling it, but submitting Himself to it, and permitting created time to become and be the form of His eternity. […]

The Christian message cannot be distinguished from a myth or dream of this kind unless God’s eternity has temporality in the sense described, and God is really pre-temporal, supra-temporal and post-temporal. If God’s eternity is not understood in this way the Christian message cannot be proclaimed in any credible way or received by faith. For the content of this message depends on the fact that God was and is and is to be, that our existence stands under the sign of a divine past, present and future, that in its differentiation this sign does not point away into space, to a God who, in fact, is neither past, present nor future. Without God’s complete temporality the Christian message has no shape. Its proclamation is only an inarticulate mumbling. Therefore everything depends on whether God’s temporality is the simple truth which cannot be attacked from any quarter because it has its basis in God Himself, which is not then a mere appearance, a bubble constructed by human feeling or thought.”

• Barth, Karl, 2009: Church Dogmatics; II.1 The Doctrine of God. New York: T&T Clark. (Utg på tyska av Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1940-1942.) §31.3, S. 186,190 (KD S. 616, 620).