GODLINESS IN TRUTH
Monday, March 15th, 2010GODLINESS IN TRUTH
“Likewise, my brethren, you have undergone death as to the Law through the crucified body of
Christ, so that now you may belong to Another, Who was raised from the dead in order that we may
bear fruit for God.
For when we were in the flesh (living physical lives), the sinful passions that were awakened
and aroused up by what the Law calls sin were constantly operating in our natural powers (in
our bodily organs, in the sensory appetites and desires of the flesh), so that we bore fruit for death.
But now we are discharged from the Law and have terminated our interaction with it, having died
to what once restrained and held us captive. So now we serve not under obedience to the old code
of written regulations, but under obedience to the promptings of the Spirit in newness of life.
(Romans 7. 4-6).
Here again is Barth:
FRUIT UNTO GOD
Human thought, will and action- can not be defined as SANCTIFIED, apart from
that grace which is grounded in the freedom of God.
Men, when observed as men, even religious men are -IN THE FLESH. Their behaviour is turned toward
death and away from God, for their thoughts and intentions and actions are of the earth and must be
pronounced unholy and sinful, -peculiarly unholy and peculiarly sinful, when, in their fantasies, they
imagine that they are like unto God.
The mature and well-balanced man, standing firmly with both feet on the earth, who has never been
lamed and broken and half-blinded by the scandal of his life, is as such the existentially godless man.
His vigor is the vigor of the lusts of his mortal body. If we undertake to catalogue these lusts, we
have to own that the higher, as, for example, the excitement of religion, are distinguished from
the lower, as for example the desire for sleep, only in degree.
Apart from the final word of forgiveness, erotic passions are as precarious as the passions of
politics, the passions of ethics as suspicious as the passions of aesthetics.
It is passion itself which ought not to be allowed to run its course unbroken and entire.
Since the passions of sin spring ultimately from the ‘vitality of mortality’, their vigorous
energy can- apart from the final word ” Resurrection’-produce only FRUIT UNTO DEATH.
Their intentions and achievements are all bounded by time and can in no sense
be stretched into infinity. This whole activity is governed by its inexorable passage
from life unto death.
And moreover, law hastens rather than checks this inevitable passing to death of the
world of the flesh; for law is the highest achievement of ‘humanity’- a grim word of double
meaning! When we have grasped the significance of the direction in which human passion
moves, we are confronted with the possibility of religion. Though religion,
it is true, opposes the passion of men, yet it too stands within the bracket which
is defined by the all-embracing word SIN.”
Here the passage of Holy Scripture is clear that the Law is holy, just and good but
since men and women are sold under sin because of the carnal human nature; “sin, seizing the
opportunity and getting a hold on me (by taking its incentive) from the commandment, beguiled
and entrapped and cheated me and using it as a weapon killed me.”
(Romans 7.11).
The human effort and endeavour to obey the Law perfectly always comes short of the glory of God.
However many fall into the false sense of righteousness, self-sufficiency and a smugness that
seems justified as that of the Pharisees. The professionally religious are the ones Jesus Christ
assailed with greatest vehemence. Barth explains this rather vividly:
” A man may or may not act religiously; but if he does so act, it is widely supposed that he does well
and is thereby justified and established and secure. In fact however, he merely establishes himself,
rests upon his own competence and treats his own ambitions as adequate and satisfactory.
Religion, then, so far from dissolving men existentially, so far from rolling them out and pressing
them against the wall, so far from overwhelming them and transforming them,
acts upon them like a drug which has been extremely skilfully administered.
Instead of counteracting human illusions, it does no more than introduce an alternative condition of
pleasurable emotion. Thus it is that the possibility of religion enables the essentially godless man to
attain the full maturity of his godlessness by bringing forth a rich and conspicuous harvest of
FRUIT UNTO DEATH.
What human passion is more obviously temporary than the passion of religion?
What passion, when allowed free course, is more clearly analogous to death?
What region of human activity is so thickly studded with cemeteries as is the region
of Christian apologetics and dogmatics and ethics and sociology?
Consequently, we are bound to state quite boldly: THE LAW WORKETH WRATH.
Having said this, we have laid bare the frontier of religion.
BUT NOW WE HAVE BEEN DISCHARGED FROM THE LAW. Kuhl pronounces this to be a reference
to the ‘experience of baptism’. But that is precisely what it is not.
We dare once again to affirm what no man can affirm of himself.
We are bold, knowing that we are compelled to audacity.
The limitation which we have recognized and defined, is broken through; we stand on the
other side of human possibility, the possibility of religion.”
Here, Barth is saying that after we recognize our sinful nature and the counter- productive
nature of religiosity, we stand on the other side.
We realize that religiosity and godliness could be poles apart. In fact, he
says that, far from confronting and transforming men, religion serves to induce a drug- like effect
on people. This causes the religious experience to substitute the real transformation by getting
to know the true Almighty God. Jesus Christ says: God is Spirit and those that come to Him
must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth.
This then brings us to the other side of religious effort, enterprise and endeavour.
This then means that we must be transformed by the spiritual birth, the rebirth from above.
This is not a human activity or experience.
This divine action is accomplished by Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit by the Father’s will.
By God’s grace we are saved through faith.
” For sin shall no longer exert dominion over you, since now you are not under Law, but under grace.”
(Romans 6.14).
Barth says: ” But ‘our’ being under grace is not an experience, not one type of human behavior,
not a particular condition of human activity.
Not by virtue of our own freedom are we what we are; but rather we are what we
are not- by the freedom of God. We are unencumbered by the inner contradictions of religion,
and undisturbed by the questionable ambiguity of its sinful passions, in spite of the relativity of its
experiences and occurrences.
The heaven which bounds this world of ours is rent asunder in the eternal ‘Moment’ of apprehension,
in the light of the resurrection, in the light of God, in order that our vision may have space to
perceive, not what men think and will and do, but what God thinks and wills and does.
Standing in the shadow of the Law, we are enabled by the brilliance of this BUT NOW
(in Romans 3.21)”.
” But now the righteousness of God has been revealed independently and altogether apart from
the Law, although actually it is attested by the Law and the Prophets.”
Barth says: ” Standing in the shadow of the Law, we are enabled by the brilliance of this BUT NOW-
light from light uncreated!- to look back upon the Law and its dialectic as upon that which is
done away.
Moved and shaken and tossed hither and thither by the sudden changes and chances of religious
experience, with which we too are more or less familiar, we are able even now to reach
out towards that calm and peaceful region where the swinging pendulum is at rest.
Wowen into the crude texture of the occurrences of religion,
in which everything-yes, everything!- human is involved, we stand nevertheless, already in
the primal and ultimate history where all ambiguity, all polarity, every ‘not only’- but also’ is
done away, because God is all in all.
We stand already where the temporal order, from which we can not escape, stands over against us
as one completed whole, bounded by the Day of Jesus Christ;
where we know ourselves to be finally liberated from the coils of our humanity, in which,
as religious men, we are bound and throttled.’ Liberated!’ But we have
said too much. We have spoken ‘after the manner of men’ (Romans 6.9).
What do we mean when we say that we are ‘finally liberated’?
If we mean that something observable has taken place in us and in others, we have returned
again to Law and religion. Once again we have become irridescent with human possibility.
Is there born of woman any Super-man
who is not with Christ under Law ‘as long as he lives’? When we assert that ‘we’ live no longer
under Law, that the possibility of religion lies behind us as some finished thing, we know not
what we say, and we utter that which is not lawful for us to utter.
Nevertheless, we do make this assertion. As we previously pronounced the ineffable
imperative of sanctification (Romans 6.12-23), so now we proclaim again what is impossible.
We pronounce that which should enter no human ear and proceed from no human mouth.
The truth has encountered us from beyond
a frontier we have never crossed; it is as though we had been transfixed by an arrow launched at
us from beyond an impassable river. But woe to us, if we do nor utter what must be uttered,
if we do not speak of that which the unobservability alone is observable.
We speak as prisoners at liberty, as blind seeing, as dead and behold we live.
It is not we who speak: Christ is the end of law, the frontier of religion.
HAVING DIED TO THAT WHEREIN WE WERE HELD PRISONERS.
The frontier of religion is the line of death which separates flesh from spirit, time from eternity,
human possibility from the possibility of God. In so far as this sharp
sword has cleft its way through; in so far, that is , as the power and significance of the Cross,
which is the token of judgement and of grace, has cast upon us its shadow- we are ‘discharged
from theLaw’. We supposed that we could escape the all-embracing Memento mori,
and we were thereby imprisoned.”
Here Barth is saying that now that we are dead to the Law of sin and death we are alive to the
higher Law of the Spirit of righteousness.
He continues: ” What seemed to us pure and upright and broken was shown to be for that
reason impure and crooked and crippled.
Engaged in earnest and vigorous acts of piety, we thought ourselves in possession of that which
could never be frozen into stark death. And so religion blossomed forth as the supreme possibility;
and who can rid himself of this humanity?
Is it not demonstrably clear that expectation of life is the most characteristic
feature of religious piety; and that men cling to religion with a bourgeois tenacity,
supposing it to be that final thing of the soul and sense which is deathless and unshattered.
But religion must die. In God we are rid of it. We must apprehend this last concrete thing bounded-
aye, radically bounded and placed in question. We, like all clear-sighted men from Job to
Dostoyevsky, are compelled to recognize, whether we acknowledge it or not, that
our concerete status in the world of time and of men and of things lies under the
shadow of death. Living under the shadow of the Cross, we acknowledge our relatedness to Christ.
(Romans 6.5); and, when we say that we are discharged from the Law, we know what we are doing-as men
who do not know! It is permitted to us to say that under Law we are more exceedingly under
grace; or we are ‘devout’- as though we were not so; we live-ignoring our experiences,
or rather, transcending them.
We are, then, competent to look, it may be but a little way, beyond ourselves, beyond
what is in us and through us and of us, to smile and to weep at what we are.
Perhaps, even our religion retains some vestige of its own insignificance; perhaps it
also knows its lack of solemnity, and efficacy, and is conscious of its limitations.
Perhaps, however our piety lacks this perception.
Whether we perceive it or not, whenever men are under the Law, there emerges
a piety which celebrates no final triumph and boasts no final justification, but which,
nevertheless, refuses to regard its failure as the final tragedy, because it is a piety which
continually bears witness to a significance lying beyond itself.
The road of religion passes through prophecy, through speaking with tongues, through
the knowledge of mysteries, through the giving-of-goods-to-feed-the-poor,
through all such things- and it passes onwards still.
The road is most strangely defined almost entirely in negatives; but is named the ‘ incomperehensible
way of love ‘ (I. Corinthians 12.31). Can this rightly be named a road? It is no road- which we can
observe or investigate or even enter upon. We can only pass along it.
It is he road- which is the shadow cast by the Cross upon all ‘healthy’ human life:
which is the place where the tenacity of men is invisibly, yet most effectually, disturbed and
shattered and dissolved;
the place where the competence of God, of the Spirit,
of Eternity, can enter within our horizon. HAVING DIED TO THAT WHEREIN WE WERE
HELD PRISONERS.
Having died, that is to the flesh.
May this invisible vision be ours!
May we perceive that we are without doubt held and moved and directed by the sure and
triumphant freedom of God! May we apprehend the command’ Thus far and no further’
which bars the flood when it has submerged the loftiest peaks of human achievement.
SO THAT WE SERVE IN NEWNESS OF SPIRIT, NOT IN OLDNESS OF THE LETTER.
Sanctify yourselves!
Be servants of God! This is the imperative of grace ( Romans 6.22).
Were this to mean that we were to serve God in some new, more refined, more detailed
OLDNESS OF THE LETTER, we should be confronted merely by a new piety.
We have now to show that NEWNESS OF SPIRIT denotes the possibility which has
its beginning in God, beyond the frontier of the old and of every new possibility of religion.
Thus far we have tried to apprehend the limits of religion. We have been concerned with
negative truth. But religion has also a positive truth; for in religion the Spirit veritably
enters in on our behalf with groanings which can not be uttered (Romans 8.26).
HALLELUJAH! THANK YOU HOLY SPIRIT FOR INTERCEDING FOR US ACCORDING
GOD”S WILL!