religiousness,’ which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect.”1
October, 1933,
Lancaster, Pa.
CONTENTS
Psalms 24:7
Proverbs 16:2
Proverbs 18:10
Ecclesiastes 3:11
Isaiah 54:7–10
Isaiah 60:19–20
Matthew 11:28
Matthew 5:8
Matthew 6:25–34
John 3:1–10
Luke 12:49
Matthew 26:14–16
Revelation 1:17, 18
Ephesians 1:1, 2, 4–6
1 Corinthians 15:12–14
Acts 2:4, 7–11
“SEEK THE THINGS THAT ARE ABOVE”
Colossians 3:1, 2
Philippians 4:7
2 Corinthians 2:5–11
THE FREEDOM OF THE WORD OF GOD
2 Corinthians 2:14–17
2 Corinthians 3:12–17
2 Corinthians 4:7–15
2 Corinthians 4:16–18
2 Corinthians 5:1–8
2 Corinthians 6:1, 2
THE SERMONS OF KARL BARTH
By JOSEPH FORT NEWTON
Why do people go to church, if they do go? What do they really want to hear, though they may not have formulated their need clearly in their own minds? What is the unasked question for which they are seeking an answer? Why do they go again and again, in spite of many disappointments, yearning deeply, listening intently, as if the word they want to hear may any moment come to birth and bring the blessing they seek?
They do not go to church to hear about science, philosophy, economics, or art, useful as such studies may be. Nor do they go to hear the preacher tell of his faith, his feelings, his experiences, much less his opinions on life and its problems. No, they go sorely needing and sadly seeking something else, something more primary and profound—longing to hear a voice out of the heavens, telling them the things eye hath not seen nor ear heard. They go seeking, as of old, the healing touch which makes them know that they are not alone in their struggle for the good; wanting to hear the forgiving, redeeming, all-inclusive, all-solving Word of God which embraces the whole of life—“the one Word alongside of which there is and can be no other.”
Such is the vision of preaching in the soul of Karl Barth, out of which his theology was born, not as an academic adventure, but as a response to divine urging in contact with aching human need; an effort “to tell that God becomes man, but to tell it as the Word of God, as God Himself tells it,”—nothing less, nothing else. If we are to understand his theology, he tells us, we must hear all through it the question which the preacher puts to his own soul and tries to answer, “What is preaching?” It was while in the pastorate, looking into his own heart and into the expectant faces of his people, that he discovered that preaching, as he had been trying to practice it—the preaching of spiritual values, based on his own inner experience or that of others, seeking to satisfy religious needs—is not enough, and was indeed no longer possible for him. Hence his quest for a Word more authentic, more authoritative, more intimately personal, more inviting, in which the contradictions of human life are reconciled; an answer to the cry of the soul not for truths, but for Truth, not for solutions but for the Solver, not “for something human, but for God as Saviour even from humanity.”
What, then, is preaching? “It is thirty minutes to raise the dead in,” said Ruskin; and only the living word of the Living God can work such a wonder. So defined, it is an august and impossible undertaking, “an act of daring,” as Barth admits, and only the man who would rather not preach, he adds, and cannot escape from it, ought ever to attempt it. Who, alas, is sufficient for these things? The answer