Category Archives: Romans

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Barth’s Romans Commentary

I’m finally reading the famous commentary on Romans. Of course, there are all the sharpened descriptions of contradiction between God and humanity, stunning and blunt: “In the Resurrection the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but touches it as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it” (30). “But the activity of the community is related to the Gospel only in so far as it is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell and seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself” (36). “Precisely because the ‘No’ of God is all-embracing, it is also His ‘Yes’” (38).

What is most striking just now, having spent last week with him, is how much I feel like I’m reading a biblical commentary written by Kierkegaard. Barth quotes him on the very first page, and throughout you can almost touch the Dane, he’s so palpably present. His ideas are ubiquitous: the “Paradox” (29); “contradiction” (38); “seriousness” and the demand for “choice” (39); God in “incognito” (39); the “qualitative distinction between God and man” (39); the impossibility of “direct communion” (50); and more than any other, the absolute difference between “time and eternity” (29, 44, 47), which is the presupposition of Barth’s whole text.

Yet, there is also another strand, it seems, running through Barth’s commentary, the side that sees the rest on the other side of judgment. This may well be the kinder (less polemical, more pastoral) part of Kierkegaard: “No, he who opens his arms and invites all–ah, if all, all you who labor and are burdened, were to come to him, he would embrace them all and say: Now remain with me, for to remain with me is rest” (Practice in Christianity, 15). And Barth: “the Creator has not abandoned the creation… the faithfulness of God to [humanity] still abides” (41); and, “He is the hidden abyss; but He is also the hidden home at the beginning and end of all our journeyings” (46). Of course, Barth had been a pastor ten years when he wrote this text, so he knew well the need to be assured of God’s faithfulness, that the “Yes” will be heard on the other side of the “No.”

I’m curious how much Kierkegaard’s influence will appear through the rest of the commentary, both explicit and not so subtly hidden.

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Romans 11:33-12:8: Sneak Peek

Since I’m speaking at youth on Friday, I thought I’d put my two years of Greek to work and translate the text I’m speaking from. Here it is:

[11:33] Oh what rich depth and wisdom and knowledge are God’s, that his decisions are so beyond examining and his paths are untraceable! [34] For who knew the mind of the Lord, or who was his advisor? [35] Who first gave him something so that they would be repaid? [36] Because everything is from him and through him and to him—let the glory be his into eternity. Amen.

[12:1] Therefore, I challenge you, brothers and sisters, through God’s compassion, to offer up your bodies as a living, holy sacrifice pleasing to God—your thoughtful worship. [2] And don’t be patterned just like this age, but be transformed by a change of mind, in order to test what the will of God is: good, pleasing, complete.

[3] For through the grace given me, I say to each one of you: do not think better of yourself than you should, but think sanely, since God has given a piece of faith to each of you. [4] Because just as we have many parts in one body, and every part does not function the same, [5] so many of us are one body in Christ, and each person is a part of the others. [6] But we have different gifts based on the grace given to us, whether that’s prophetic—based on one’s piece of faith— [7] or for service in the church’s ministry; or as a teacher in education; [8] or as someone who challenges people, encouraging them; someone who shares with others in generosity; someone who leads others by working hard; or someone who happily extends mercy.

This section marks the end of a long three chapters on how God has spread Israel’s promises and gifts into all the world (Romans 9-11). Paul then enters into a longer section on how we should respond to all these gifts by offering up everything we are as “a living, holy sacrifice pleasing to God” (12:1-15:13). So in a way, this passage is a sneak peek on the last part of the letter to the Romans too.