I Am With Karl Barth On This One

I find it interesting that Barth believed the authority of God's word was the answer the Germany's problems with the Nazis in the 1930s. Because the answer to our problems today is the same. The answer is unchanged by circumstances and time.

"The church of Jesus Christ is a crowd, a throng, a gathering - a "community" as that beautiful, old word expresses it; it is a word that we have to learn to understand all over again in a completely new way - a community that is not held together by common interests and that is not held together by common blood and not even by common opinions and convictions but certainly a community held together rather by that voice that hear at the beginning and at the end of our text, a voice that sounds repeatedly and that is never to be falsified nor ever confused with any other tones in the world, 'The God of patience and comfort give you all...! The hope fill you all...!' The voice that speaks to us in this way, so pleadingly and at the same time so giving, so serious and also so friendly, is, in the words of the apostle Paul, the voice of the divine Word himself, from whom the church of Jesus Christ is born and from whom she must always feed and from whom alone she may be fed. God knows who God is; and in his Word he tells us: he is the God who gives patience, comfort and hope. God knows that we need him as we need nothing else and yet we have no power over him; and in his word he tells us this, he pulls our thinking and longing together and brings these to himself, that we must implore: May he grant us! May he fill us! And God knows how close to us and how ready he is for us; and in his Word he tells us this by placing on our lips as a deep sigh from closest proximity and in deepest and most sure trust in him this petition: May he grant us! May he fill us! May this voice, with which God tells us what he knows of himself and of us, ring out from the past. The apostle Paul is really very far away from us, and the whole Bible is very far away from all the books and newspapers that we read. If the Bible still rings out with its sounds, its news, its claim and encouragement, then the church of the Jesus Christ is present, in which even I, by hearing this voice, 'am a living member and will remain so forever'"

This is an excerpt from a sermon preached by Karl Barth, December 10, 1933 in Sclosskirche in Bonn, Germany.