Herald of God’s Grace

A Sermon Preached by John B. Rogers, Jr.

Covenant Presbyterian Church; Charlotte, North Carolina
Sunday, May 14, 2006

Old Testament Lesson: 1st Chronicles 29: 10-15

New Testament Lesson: Ephesians 2: 1-10
Text: Romans 11: 33, 36

Wednesday, May 10, marked the 120th anniversary of the birth of the most important theologian of modern times
… some would say the most important theologian since the Reformation. His name is Karl Barth, and you have heard
me refer to him numerous times in the 11+ years that we have worshiped and studied together as minister and
congregation. As we move into the final two months of our formal relationship, I want to focus on Barth’s contribution
to the faith of the church. I do this as a way of acquainting you with a teacher who has had much to do with what I
have been saying to you from this pulpit for going on 12 years. And I do it in part as a way of expressing my own
personal gratitude for his teaching me to sing the gospel. The purpose is not so much to learn about Barth himself – he
would be the first to insist that that is quite unimportant. Our purpose is, rather, to hear Barth’s witness to Jesus Christ
and to learn from him what it means to celebrate the gospel of God’s amazing grace.

I do not know any other theologian who makes so clear and compelling the good news at the heart of our faith.
Above all else, Karl Barth was a theologian of grace … a servant of the lively and liberating word of God’s gracious
decision to be our God: our creator and provider, our judge and redeemer. Barth was a kind of troubadour of this good
and bounteous God who, in Jesus Christ, elects to be God with us and God for us:
• in person …
• in life and in death …
• always …
• to the close of the age.

And so we consider this morning Karl Barth, “herald of God’s grace.”

I.
Barth was born on a Monday, May 10, 1886 in Basel, Switzerland. His father Fritz was a minister in the Swiss
Reformed Church, as had been both of his grandfathers.

As a young student, Karl did not care much for school. He called it “an inevitable cross I had to bear.” He was
much more interested in drama, and wrote his first play at the age of 10.

As a young man, Barth had two very different sides to his character:
• a sensitive side that loved literature and music, especially Mozart;
• and a militant, competitive side that often got him into fights with his friends at school

As a child, Barth loved to play soldier, and was fascinated by the history of warfare. This interest in military history con-
tinued throughout his life. On his first and only trip to America after his retirement, he celebrated his 76th birthday in
Richmond where he toured Civil War battlefields. He wrote:

In a ruined Civil War fort by the James River, I fired a hundred-year-old musket, and to the honor of the
Swiss army even hit the target [ – an event which could with good will be regarded as symbolic of my
other capabilities and successes.]
Although Swiss neutrality denied Barth any experience in direct combat, he took satisfaction in the guard duty he per-
formed, in full uniform, during both world wars. As a young pastor he organized snowball fights among his confirma-
tion classes “to heighten our mutual pleasure.”

II.
The context in which Barth’s theology took shape was the church … the worshiping, believing community of faith.
In 1911, at the age of 25, Barth became pastor of the Reformed Church in Safenwil, an agricultural and industrial
community in Switzerland. For 10 years he served there as pastor … struggling with the problems every pastor faces …
especially the problem of preaching which he saw as an awesome undertaking.

Listen as he describes it:

Before me lies the Bible, full of mystery; and before me are seated my more or less numerous hearers, also
full of mystery. What now? There is in the air an expectancy that something great, crucial, even
momentous is to happen.… Here is a building of which the very architecture betrays the fact that it is
thought of as a place of extraordinary doings … Here are people: They are women and men with good
consciences and with bad, the content and the discontent, the certain and the uncertain, those who
believe … those who half-believed … those who do not believe.

Here is an individual, upon whom the expectation seems to rest in a special way. And now before the
congregation and for the congregation he will pray … to God! He will open the Bible and read from it
words of infinite import, words that refer, all of them, to God. And then he will enter the pulpit and –
here is daring! – preach. That is, he will add to what has been read from the Bible something from his
own head and heart. He will speak of God. And the congregation will sing ancient songs full of weighty
memories, full of reminiscences of God, always of God … all leading to the edge of a stupendous claim:
“God is present!” The whole situation witnesses, cries, simply shouts of it.

And the people are there because they want to know: “Is it true!?” Is it true:
• this sense of a meaning and purpose amid human confusion,
• of something, or someone, eternal amid changing appearances;
• of a righteousness not somewhere behind the stars but within the events which are our present life.
Is it true, this talk of a loving and good God, who is more than one of the friendly idols whose rise is so
easy to account for, and whose dominion is so brief? What the people want to find out and thoroughly
understand is, Is it true?

People naturally do not shout it out, and least of all into the ears of us ministers. But let us not be
deceived by their silence. They come with a passionate longing for one who overcomes the world because
he is its creator and redeemer, its beginning and ending and Lord … a passionate longing to have the
word spoken, the word that promises grace in judgment, life in death, the beyond in the here and now.
They want to know: Is it true? Is it true:
• that in all things there is meaning;
• that in all things there is a goal;
• that in all things there is God?

Is it true that from him and through him and to him are all things?

John B. Rogers, Jr. “Herald of God’s Grace” Page 2

 How is it possible, Barth asks over and over again, for a mere human being to speak in the name of God? Not how
ought one to do it … but how can one do it? How does one preach, as it were, with the Bible in one hand and the
morning newspaper in the other? How does God’s word from one time and place in history come alive for another
vastly different time and place? It was in this weekly struggle to deal faithfully with the central task of preaching that
Barth’s theology took shape.

III.
Barth had been educated in Switzerland and Germany in the liberal theology that dominated the late 19th century:
• with its tremendous optimism …
• its belief in human progress …
• its shallow view of sin …
• its high view of human ability, and human moral achievement.

But for Barth, as for so many of his generation, all of that was shattered by the first world war. When the war broke out,
Barth was horrified to learn that nearly all of his former teachers of theology had signed the “Manifesto of the Intellec-
tuals” supporting the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Barth felt betrayed. He felt that everything he had been taught
had proven bankrupt, and thus he must learn his theological ABC’s all over again. With the roar of artillery sounding
in the background he simply could not stand in his pulpit Sunday after Sunday and preach the shallow liberal theology
he had been taught, with its cliches about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Such theology with its
human-centered hope proved empty in the face of the traumas of his day. Barth was driven back to the Bible. There he
began to explore what he called “the strange new world within the Bible.”

What Barth discovered in that strange new world is the even greater expectancy with which the Bible meets and
encounters men and women. The Bible, he says, has expectations of people who will and can believe in its promise in
the midst of their need. God expects, God seeks such people. In the Bible it is not we who seek answers to questions
about life, our affairs, our wants and wishes. It is the Lord who seeks us. The expectancy brought to the situation by the
congregation, intense as it may be, is in truth small and insignificant in comparison to that expectancy which comes
from the side of the open Bible … the great expectancy with which God himself arrives first on the scene.

Out of the struggles of a young pastor to find a faith and reality to preach that has power for the living of daily life,
Barth became a theologian of scripture, and began a revolution that turned the theology of his day upside down. This
upheaval was marked by the publication, in 1922, of Barth’s Commentary on Romans which fell, as Karl Adam said:
“like bombshell on the playground of the theologians.” Barth himself said that the astonishing response to this book
reminded him of the time when, as a boy, he was sneaking up the dark tower of a church at night; he grabbed a rope to
steady himself only to find that it was attached to the bell which began to ring, waking up the entire village.

With tremendous power and passion Barth insisted over and over that faith in God is not something that begins
with us and works its way up from below to God. Faith is generated by the weight of God upon us and the presence of
God with us from beyond ourselves … the weight and presence of one from whom and through whom and to whom are
all things. We do not discover God by our own wisdom and intellect. Only God can make himself known to us. We do
not speak properly of God simply by speaking of ourselves in a loud voice. God is beyond all our human
comprehension. God is not a thing among other things, a power among other powers, one whom we can take or leave
as the mood strikes us. God, rather, is the wholly other, the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth who has graciously
chosen us. Over against the liberal theology of his day that had obscured the radical otherness of God, Barth roared like
a lion that God is God. We know God only as God freely chooses to make himself known to us in his word that became
flesh in Jesus Christ, and that comes to us as scripture bears witness to Jesus Christ.

John B. Rogers, Jr. “Herald of God’s Grace” Page 3

 Now, that was and continues to be a very important negative affirmation. God is not an object that we can see and
know and comprehend with our human minds. God cannot be grasped, brought under management, put to use. God
himself grasps, seizes, manages, and uses us. We must never lose sight of that fact.

With regard to this widespread desire to take God under human control and management, Barth was equally critical of
theological liberals and fundamentalists, saying that they merely represented two sides of the same coin of counterfeit faith.

IV.
But more needed to be said than that negative word. And Barth, to his great credit, recognized that fact and moved
on to say it … indeed, to sing it.

Certainly God is far from those who … think that they have him in their grasp. But is not far from those
who are far from him .…

After 10 years in the pastorate, Karl Barth’s career as professor of theology began at the Universities of Göttingen,
Münster, and Bonn in Germany for 14 years, and finally at the University of Basel in Switzerland for 27 years. After the
negative word of his Commentary on Romans, Barth began to work on what eventually became a 13-volume series
called Church Dogmatics.

Having been driven back to the strange new world of the Bible, Barth discovered a new starting point for all his
theology … not the negative word of God’s otherness, but the good news – the “Yes” of God’s grace in Jesus Christ to all
the world. From 1932 on Barth’s theology centered almost exclusively on the meaning of Jesus Christ – the humanity of
God. No theologian in the history of the church ever focused his theology so centrally on the reality of Jesus Christ.
That is what gives his theology its distinctiveness and its dominant note of joy and triumph.

In this monumental work, Barth insists time and again, through more than 9,000 pages, that from all eternity God
has freely elected to be with and for human beings in Jesus Christ. At the beginning and end of all God’s way is the love
we see in Christ.

The church will not then preach … a powerless grace of Jesus Christ or a wickedness of man which is too
powerful for God’s grace. But … it will preach the overwhelming power of grace and the weakness of
human wickedness in face of it.

The heart of the gospel is the good news that God is really and truly, and from all eternity, for us … and “if God is for
us, who is against us?” From God’s love nothing in all creation can ever separate us.

Barth insisted that the gospel is not both good news and bad news. It is always and entirely good news … the very
best of all possible news. The gospel is God’s own eternal “Yes!” to his creation … yes to you and to me.

For Barth, quite literally everything has to be seen and understood in light of that “Yes!” … that ringing declaration
that “God is for us!” Barth knew only too well the power of sin and evil in the world. He was one of the first to
recognize and to speak out against the evils of the Nazis in Germany. As early as 1934 he was the leader of the
confessing church that opposed Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. And he was the principal author of the Barmen
Declaration that flung the Lordship of Jesus Christ like a gauntlet before the idolatrous claims of the Third Reich.

But although Barth knew first hand the terrible power of evil, he insisted over and over again that evil does not
have the final word. It is not and will not be victorious.

The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for
ever and ever!

That note of triumphant grace … of joyful good news rings throughout his theology.

John B. Rogers, Jr. “Herald of God’s Grace” Page 4

 V.
Barth was quick to acknowledge that the word of God speaks a decided and thundering “No!” to human pride and
greed and arrogance, whether personal or corporate. And yet, he said, we need to remember that because we always stand
somewhere between Christmas and Easter, the word of God to the world, and therefore the church’s word to the world,
is primarily and ultimately the word of grace and love. For it is throughout a word about Emmanuel – “God with us…”
in life and death and destiny. To make the gospel primarily and fundamentally a condemnation – a word of judgment …
to open up the abyss between God and humanity that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ closed forever, is
not the church’s task. The preacher or the Christian witness to whom this word of grace is not absolutely the most
important word – who first of all wants to shout at, ridicule, or laugh at people on account of their folly and malice,
would do better to remain silent altogether.

Because God is for us in Jesus Christ, we in turn have a responsibility to be for one another, said Barth. For him,
theology and ethics always went hand in hand. In Jesus Christ God takes up the cause of struggling humanity and
makes it his own, so that whoever is not for humanity is not for God. Barth insists that God shows special concern for
the weak and the helpless, for the poor and outcast. God takes up the cause of those who have no one else to plead their
case. God is the advocate of the powerless … the friend of the friendless.

Barth demonstrated that concern in his own life. Although he was in constant demand to preach in the great
universities and great pulpits of the world, he much preferred to preach to what he called “my fellow prisoners” in the
Basel jail. He did so throughout his years in Basel. In fact, Barth’s last sermon, on March 29, 1964, was given at the
Basel jail on the text, “Then were the disciples happy when they saw the Lord.”

Because of declining health, Barth was unable to finish his massive Church Dogmatics. He was embarrassed by its
length, and joked of how, on seeing him entering heaven pushing a wheelbarrow full of books, the angels would laugh,
and then dump them on some pile of heavenly waste paper. Once, when asked to sum up the defining conviction
underlying his theological vision, he answered, with a wry grin: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

VI.
In his last years Barth said good-bye to many dear friends, and to some theologians with whom he had had strong
disagreements during the struggles of the church in the modern age. Barth could be a formidable theological opponent.
He once retorted to a colleague who accused him of wanting always to be right: “But I always am right!” However, he
also reported that as he grew older, he found less pleasure in saying “No” … in demolishing and dismissing … and more
pleasure in saying something positive. “But what I mean is, simply, that we should talk together and try to arrive at
answers together, instead of someone trying to present something to other people as though the Holy Spirit had
dictated it to him in person … The truth stops being the truth where it is not put forward and expressed in love.”

Barth and Paul Tillich, for all their argument and disagreement, parted as friends. They had a very moving last
meeting after which Barth quipped, “I warned him that now might be the time to get himself straight. But he did not
seem to want to do that very much.”

In a late visit with Pope Paul VI in the Vatican, Barth remarked that he preferred Joseph, the foster father of Jesus,
to Mary as the best parental image of the church. The Pope assured me, said Barth, “that he would pray that in my
advanced age I should be given a deeper insight into this matter.”

To Emil Brunner, against whom Barth had once written a very sharply worded pamphlet entitled simply, Nein!
(No!) he sent word to a friend:

John B. Rogers, Jr. “Herald of God’s Grace” Page 5

 If Brunner is still alive and it is possible, tell him again “commended to our God, even by me.” And tell
him “Yes!” … that the time when I had to say no to him is now long past. Since we all live only by virtue
of the fact that a great and merciful God says his gracious Yes to all of us.

The friend did arrive in time, and those were the last words that Emil Brunner heard in this life.

Barth’s own assessment of his life’s work in the end was to compare himself with a jackass; namely, the one who was
allowed to bear the Lord Jesus into Jerusalem. “If I have made any contribution in my life, it is as a relation of this ass,
who at that time went on his way with an important burden.”

VII.
On Monday, December 9, 1968, Barth began to work on a lecture he was to give later in Zurich. That evening, about
9:00, his faithful friend for 60 years, Eduard Thurneysen, called to talk to him. They spoke, says Barth’s biographer,
Eberhard Busch, about the gloomy world situation. Then Barth said, “But keep your chin up! Never mind! Christ will
reign!”

The call had interrupted Barth’s writing, but rather than go back to his work, he decided to leave it for the next day.
His manuscript stopped in mid-sentence …

God is not a God of the dead but of the living. In him they all live – from the apostles down to the
fathers of the day before yesterday and yesterday .…

Those were the last words Barth was to write. He died peacefully in his sleep that evening. When his wife, Nellie,
came to wake him the next morning she found him lying as if asleep, his hands folded gently from his evening prayers
… while in the background a record was playing the Mozart with which she had wanted to awaken him.

Shortly before his death Barth had written in a letter these words which sum up so well his faith and life:

Looking back, I have no serious complaints about anyone or anything … except my own failures, today,
yesterday, and the day before that … I mean my failures in being as grateful as I should have been.
Perhaps I still have bitter days ahead, and certainly my death will come sooner or later. One thing
remains for me to say and for me to remember and impress upon myself … “Do not forget the good that
God has done.”

Karl Barth: servant, herald, troubadour of God’s grace. No one in our time has given a more eloquent or powerful
witness to the reality and power of Jesus Christ in whom God is for us eternally, and through whom God’s grace
triumphs over evil, sin, and death. “The last word I have to say as a theologian and also as a politician,” Barth said in a
lecture late in his career, “is not a term like ‘grace’, but a name: ‘Jesus Christ.’” As herald of the invincible grace and
steadfast love of this bounteous God who meets us in Jesus Christ, and from whom and through whom and to whom
are all things, Karl Barth has enabled us to sing more confidently, as was sung at the close of his own memorial service
on December 13, 1968:

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful heart and blessed peace to cheer us;
And keep us in his grace. And guide us when perplexed.
And free us from all ills in this world and the next.

Amen.
[ Sources on next page]

John B. Rogers, Jr. “Herald of God’s Grace” Page 6

 Sources
Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life From Letters and Autobiographical Texts
Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans
Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man
Barth, Church Dogmatics (selected volumes)
Allen McSween, “Troubadour of God’s Grace” (sermon)

John B. Rogers, Jr. “Herald of God’s Grace” Page 7