Class Notes 1: May 4, 2004
Barth, Ch.11: "God the Son" [pp.399-447]
The one God reveals Himself according to Scripture as the Reconciler, i.e. as the Lord in the midst of our enmity towards Him. As such He is the Son of God who has come to us or the Word of God that has been spoken to us, because He is so antecedently in Himself as the Son or Word of God the Father.
1. God as Reconciler
We return to the starting-point of the previous section where we began with the question: Who is the One whom Holy Scripture calls the Lord, who has dealings with man in revelation? And where we gave the answer that at the climax of the biblical witness it is stated (obviously with the intention of stating what is true and valid for the whole of biblical witness, including the Old Testament) that Jesus of Nazareth is this Lord. We then followed first of all the line in New Testament message in which, in apparent antithesis to the statement, Jesus of Nazareth is understood rather as the Servant of the Lord who proclaims and does the will of His heavenly Father. But we then saw how also and especially the revelation of the Father might appear primarily as its pure Mediator Jesus, and how it cannot be abstracted in any sense from the Mediator according to the biblical witness. What God reveals in Jesus and how He reveals it, namely, in Jesus, must not be separated from one another according to the New Testament, and on the assumption that this prohibition is to be taken seriously we have to regard the concept of God as the Father in His relation to this Mediator of His revelation as a mode of being which truly and definitely appertains to Him; we have to regard His fatherhood as an eternal one. [p.399]
We now turn our attention again to the other line of biblical testimony which we touched on for a moment and then left again, namely, the line on which the emphasis lies, not on the distinction of Jesus from the Father, but, without denying this distinction, directly on His communion and even unity with the Father. To the statements about the relation of the Father to the Son to which we referred in the previous section there corresponds exactly a series of statements about the relation of the Son to the Father. The development of the dogma of the Trinity began with these statements and a priori it is to be expected that we shall have to follow the dogma again and specifically at this point too if the unity of the Son with the Father attested in these statements, and therefore the deity of Jesus Christ, is to be understood as definitive, authentic and essential. [pp.399-400]
The New Testament statement about the unity of the Son with the father, i.e. the deity of Christ, cannot possibly be understood in terms of the presupposition that the original view and declaration of the New Testament witnesses was that a human being was either exalted as such to deity or appeared us as the personification and symbol of a divine being. [p.402b]
First view rejected by traditional Christian stand:
ˇ§Christˇ¦s deity can be taken individualistically as the apotheosis of a man, a great man.ˇ¨ [p.402b]
ˇ§This is Ebionite Christology, or Christology historically reconstructed along the lines of Ebionitism.ˇ¨ [p.403a]
Second view rejected by traditional Christian stand:
ˇ§Christˇ¦s deity could also be taken in just the opposite sense, collectively. In Him, the theory runs, we have the personification of a familiar idea or general truth.ˇ¨ [p.403b]
ˇ§This is Docetic Christology, or Christology historically reconstructed along the lines of Docetism.ˇ¨ [p.403b]ˇ§These two conceptions or explanations of the statement about the deity of Christ seem to be in greater self-contradiction than is actually the case. The former understands Jesus as the peak or a peak in history soaring into super-history. The latter understands Him as the sucker of super-history reaching down into history.ˇ¨ [p.403c]
"Jesus is Lord - this is how we think we must understand the New Testament statement in concert