Credo. Karl Barth

Whose burning wrath we have evoked, became man in order, in spite of everything, to befriend us. If He has really done that, and if this is the central content of Christian faith, then we cannot explain and establish it from elsewhere and least of all by an analysis of our distress and despair; then we can understand it (and consequently the central content of the Christian faith) only as the occurrence of a revelation of grace, which is beyond all our understanding because it makes possible what is absolutely impossible, to which our knowledge cannot attain, and from which it can always only derive.

      It is in this way and in this sense—that is, deriving from an occurrence that cannot be understood from elsewhere but only out of itself—that the Creed begins the second Article. It is in this way and in the same sense that prophecy in the Old Testament, and its fulfilment in Jesus Christ in the New Testament, are attested. If the attempt is made to understand and interpret the witness of apostles and prophets in the light of human ideas as human explanation of human action, then even in a purely historical-exegetical treatment one self-deception and aporia follows another. They themselves at any rate did not so understand it. Even when they used the language of human ideas and were looking at a human action, their intention was to speak of a divine initiative among men, something that was to be understood as such and not as human action and human idea. The Old Testament calls this divine initiative the making known of the name of the Lord. The New Testament names it Jesus Christ. Yes, indeed, here is cause to marvel. Here the hidden, the eternal and incomprehensible God has taken visible form. Here the Almighty is mighty in a quite definite, particular, earthly happening. Here the Creator Himself has become creature and therefore objective reality. Here in His Son, in the revelation of His Name and Word, the one God has shown Himself as differentiated in Himself, so that we can hear Him, so that we can say “Thou” to Him as to one of ourselves. It is revelation in this strict, firm, literal sense that Scripture and the Confession mean when they bear witness to Jesus Christ. And the sense of this revelation becomes even stricter and firmer when this too is added—that here the abyss is bridged, that here, in and with this revelation, our reconciliation is accomplished, that this Jesus Christ is God for us, for us His incarnation, for us His existence as true God and true man, for us everything that later is said of Him from His birth of the Virgin Mary up to His return in judgment. In fact, what we are concerned with is that absolute impossibility, that the Holy One, Whose wrath we have provoked, became man, in order, in spite of everything, to befriend us, to bear this wrath Himself and in our place, accordingly to suffer in our place His own burning wrath, to give satisfaction Himself in our place, in order in that way to be our God (and that means, to be good for us in a way that we have not deserved and cannot comprehend), He Himself, directly and personally our Prophet, Priest and King. Again, neither historical facts nor ideas nor even their insight into the depth of human wickedness and distress, made the prophets and apostles, if we are to trust themselves, witnesses to Jesus Christ, but simply and solely this concentrated event of revelation and reconciliation that could not be prognosticated from anywhere because it was unexpected and in its divinity only to be acknowledged. Even the knowledge of the abyss between God’s good creation and our actual state was for them included as a supplementary cognition in and only in that event. In the mind of the prophets and apostles, then, the question of faith in Jesus Christ cannot be the question of the Why? of this event, but only the question of our decision as its actuality confronts us.