THEOLOGY FOR THE COMMUNITY

The science that Karl Barth pursues gets its subject matter from God; but it would fail, he says, if it did not serve the community of men the way a pendulum serves a clock. Barth's theological output is so vast that only a handful of men have ever read all his works. But for those willing to try them, his books offer wisdom and wit as well. A sampler of Barth's views:

ON HEAVEN: People have often made fun of this idea of "ascending into heaven." They have asked whether Christ did it like some kind of bird or aviator. And they have objected that heaven is at the nadir quite as much as at the zenith, and that the ascension should be interpreted in a merely "spiritual" sense. I would not advise anyone to deny this movement from the bottom up. It is not just an illustration. Of course, we must understand the place to which Christ goes, this "right hand of God," is a divine place. Place and time are not qualities of the creature only. There is a divine time, and a divine place, and God is the origin of time and place. There is a movement "from the bottom up." not a movement from the ground up into the clouds, but a movement from the human place to the divine place.

ON PRAYER: If we do not pray, we fail to realize that we are in the presence of God. God opens this road to us; he commands us to pray. Thus it is not possible to say "I shall pray" or "I shall not pray" as if it were an act according to our own good pleasure.

ON SCRIPTURE: When we come to the Bible with our questions--How shall I think of God and the universe? How arrive at the divine?--it answers us, as it were, "My dear sir. these are your problems: you must not ask me! Whether it is better to hear Mass or hear a sermon, whether the proper form of Christianity is to be discovered in the Salvation Army or in 'Christian Science.' whether your religion should be more a religion of the understanding, or of the feelings, you can and must decide for yourself." The Bible tells us not how we should talk with God but what he says to us; not how we find the way to him. but how he has sought and found the way to us.

ON MARRIAGE: Marriage is "chaste," honorable and truly sexual when it is encompassed by the fellowship of the spirit and of love, but also of work and of the whole of life with all its sorrows and joys, and when this total life experience justifies at the right time and place this particular relationship. When the relationship is fulfilled in this context, when the fulfillment is sustained by the environment of total coexistence, then and only then is it right and salutary. Coitus without coexistence is demonic.

ON TEMPERANCE: One may be a nonsmoker. abstainer and vegetarian, yet be called Adolf Hitler.

ON ROMAN CATHOLIC MARIOLOGY: The content of the biblical attestation of revelation does not give us any cause to acknowledge that the person of Mary in the event of revelation possesses relatively even such an independent and emphatic position as to render it necessary or justifiable to make it the object of a theological doctrine. Mariology is an excrescence, i.e., a diseased construct of theological thought. Excrescences must be excised.

ON DEATH & RESURRECTION: What is the meaning of the Christian hope in this life? A life after death? A tiny soul which, like a butterfly, flutters away above the grave and is still preserved somewhere, in order to live on immortally? That is not the Christian hope. "I believe in the resurrection of the body." Body in the Bible is quite simply man, man, moreover, under the sign of sin. And to this man it is said, Thou shalt rise again. Resurrection means not the continuation of life, but life's completion. "We shall be changed" ( I Corinthians 15); which does not mean that a quite different life begins, but that "this corruptible must put on incorruption." Then it will be manifest that "death is swallowed up in victory." That which is sown in dishonor and weakness will rise again in glory and power. The Christian hope does not lead us away from this life. It is the conquest of death, not a flight into the Beyond.

ON MUSIC: If I ever go to heaven, I would first inquire about Mozart, and only then about Augustine. Thomas, Luther, Calvin and Schleiermacher.

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