We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.
Thus in this oneness Jesus Christ is the Mediator, the Reconciler, between God and man. Thus He comes forward to MAN on behalf of GOD calling for and awakening faith, love and hope, and to GOD on behalf of MAN, representing man, making satisfaction and interceding. Thus He attests and guarantees to God's free GRACE and at the same time attests and guarantees to God man's free GRATITUDE.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes Jesus Christ's role as the mediator between God and humanity, highlighting the importance of faith, love, and gratitude.
In this quote, Karl Barth articulates the theological perspective that Jesus Christ serves as a bridge between God and mankind. He highlights how Christ intercedes on behalf of humanity to God by representing our needs and expressing our gratitude, while simultaneously conveying God's expectations of faith, love, and hope back towards humanity. This dual representation underscores a relationship of reciprocity and grace between the divine and humanity.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a sermon discussing the role of faith in personal growth, this quote can be referenced.
More from Karl Barth
All quotes βWhen we speak of our virtues we are competitors, when we confess our sins we become brothers.
Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.
That the zeal for God's honor is also a dangerous passion, that the Christian must bring with him the courage to swim against the tide instead of with it... accept a good deal of loneliness, will perhaps be nowhere so clear and palpable as in the church, where he would so much like things to be different. Yet he cannot and he will not refuse to take this risk and pay this price... he belongs where the reformation of the church is underway or will again be underway.
In the Church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians.
Christian worship is the most momentous, most urgent, most glorious action that can take place in human life.
Similar quotes
And although I have seen nothing but black crows in my life, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a white crow. Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be important not to reject the possibility of finding a white crow. You might almost say that hunting for 'the white crow' is science's principal task.
Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.
I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this.
The concept that one ought to restrict one's political involvement to one's own state was deeply antithetical to those who were pursuing the accumulation of capital for its own sake.
Vastly more important than all questions with regard to methods of preaching is the root question as to what it is that shall be preached.
To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.