Come, Holy Spirit: Sermons

308 Pages·2017·50.05 MB·English

by  Karl Barth

COME HOLY
SPIRIT
Sermons!
BY KARL BARTH
PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF BONN, GERMANY
AND
EDUARD THURNEYSEN
MINISTER OF THE REFORMED
CHURCH, BASLE, SWITZERLAND
English Translation by
professor GEORGE W. RICHARDS, d.d., ll.d., d.Th.
THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF THE REFORMED CHURCH
IN THE U. S. A., LANCASTER, PA.
reverend ELMER G. HOMRIGHAUSEN, s.t.m., Th.d.
MINISTER OFTHE REFORMED CHURCH, INDIANAPOLIS, IND.
PROFESSOR-LECTURER IN BUTLER UNIVERSITY.
professor KARL J. ERNST, ph.d., d.d.
MISSION HOUSE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY,
PLYMOUTH, WIS.
TRANSLATION READ AND APPROVED
BY KARL BARTH
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Grand Rapids, Michigan
(p Round TablePress Inc. 1933
This edition published in 1978 in the U.S.A.
by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
ISBN 0-8028-1782-3
Printed in Great Britain
FOREWORD
/
When a person achieves greatness in his lifetime, he often, so
it would seem, suffers an eclipse after his death. This has been
the case with Karl Barth. Even those who were most critical of
his theology were willing to admit that he is one of the greatest
Christian thinkers of all time, but even while he was still alive,
his influencewasbeginningtowane. Today, manytaketheview
that even ifwhat he taught was right for the inter-war and post-
war years, it is not relevant to our time; that his strongly biblical
emphases are not possible in a time of radical biblical criticism;
that the centrality which he accorded to Jesus Christ is not
appropriate in an age when we have to relate to other religions
and secular ideologies; that his appeal to the revealed Word does
not accord with the contemporary empirical temperament; and
so on.
When one turns back to the early sermons contained in this
volume, these conventionaljudgments of Barth are bound to be
placed in question. One finds surprising resemblances between
the situations which he faced and those that confront us today.
When he speaks of the ‘one universal need which, like a flood,
covers the whole earth’ and that ‘today we see clearly how all
need hangs together,’ he might have been preaching last week
rather than fifty years ago.
But I don’t think one would commend these sermons on the
ground that they are somehow still ‘relevant.’ This would be to
concede too much to the cult of relevance and to the shallow
view that any religious teaching is a product of the cultural
factors operating at the time. The great human geniuses are
those who transcend their own time and culture and have a word,
for all times. There is something of this in Barth. After all, he
FOREWORD
had himself grown up under the influence of the humanistic
liberal theologies ofthe nineteenth century. But he broke out of
that when he realized that a God who has been accommodated
to society and made its patron saint, so to speak, is not the living
God, and that in any age man needs a God who can say both
Yes and No. Such, he believed, is the God ofthe Christian and
biblical tradition. According to his biographer, Eberhard
Busch, Barth achieved around 1020 the true insight that ‘Godis
not an opiate for men, but their limit; he does not restore their
equilibrium but upsets them, confronts them with crisis/
Whatever criticisms one may level against various aspects of
Barth’s theology, no one can deny that he did have this central
insight, and that it is no mere product ofa particular conjunction
of circumstances but belongs to authentic Christian faith in any
time.
Barth believed that the tasks of theology and preaching are
closely connected. These sermons give a taste of his theology
to those who may never read his voluminous theological writings.
His theology is sometimes called dialectical, and his preaching is
dialectical too. What does this mean? In the words of one of
hissermons,itmeansthat,whenweconsiderGodandhismeaning
for human life, ‘there is still something that is overlooked and
forgotten, still something to be taken into consideration, still
anotherpossibility athand.’ Ifoneapproaches Christianity with
this understanding of it, then it is something growing and
dynamic, not an opiate but the limit which summons us out of
ourselves.
John Macquarrie
THE TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE
These sermons were prepared from 1920 to 1924.
Professor Barth preached some of them while he was
minister of the Reformed congregation in Safenwil,
Canton Aargau, Switzerland others in the Reformed
$
Church in Göttingen while he was professor of the-
ology in the University. Pastor Thurneysen at that
time preached to the congregation in Bruggen, near
St. Gall, Switzerland. The sermons were written not
for special occasions but for the regular Sunday morn-
ing service, and were addressed to such men an—d women
as one will find in any village or city church to men
and women in the struggle for life, waiting and seek-
ing for God.
Pastor Thurneysen selected the sermons and ar-
ranged them according to a scheme that may be indi-
cated by the words Promise, Christ, Christian Living.
These titles, however, do not appear either in the table
of contents or in the context. The motive of the
sequence of the sermons is suggested by the choice of
texts. For the first—six sermons these are taken from
the Old Testament from the Psalms, Proverbs, Ec-
clesiastes, Isaiah for the next eleven sermons, from
the New Testamjent, six from the Gospels and five
from the Epistles for the last eight, one from the
5
Epistle to the Philippians and seven from the Second
Epistle to the Corinthians.- The sermons are, there-
fore, to be considered as forming an organic whole
THE TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE
setting forth the different aspects of the Word of God
in prophecy, in the Christ, in the Christian. Their
sequence is not logical, nor biological, but theological,
Christological, soteriological.
Four editions in German have been published. This
is the first volume of sermons from the Barthian school
to appear in English. The translators found it difficult
to put into clear, fluent English the distinctive thought,
the paradoxical statements, and the idioms of the origi-
nal text. They tried to be true to the authors, to the
content of their discourses, and to the English reader.
To what extent they have succeeded the reader will
have to determine.
These sermons are not popular, clever, eloquent
pulpit discourses such as the modern audience is accus-
tomed to hear and to applaud. They probably would
not receive large space in an American Monday morn-
ing newspaper. They cannot be easily comprehended,
because they are so different in form and content from
any sermons that have ever been published in this or
any other age. They must be read and pondered, re-
read and pondered again, until the truth in them be-
comes spirit and life in the reader.
The aim of the s—ermons is to give God’s answer to
—man’s primary needs his deep, inward, spiritual needs
-which must be satisfied before anv other needs can
be satisfied The sermons, therefore, do not soothe
.
or please or flatter the reader. He may lay them aside
without reading them to the end, because he is made to
feel,—as never before, his worthlessness and helpless-
ness the worthlessness even of the best that he thinks
and does. Not only the sinner but the righteous man
is brought to judgment and must cry for mercy. There-
THE TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE
fore the reader may say to himself: “Can I do nothing
that is acceptable to God? Nothing that is worthwhile?
Am
Does not this lead to hopeless despair? I not
robbed of all power of moral endeavor?”
That is precisely the effect that the preachers intend
to produce in the reader, or the hearer. For man must
be overcome, humbled to the dust, before God can
lav hold of him, lift him up, mold him to and for His
eternal purpose. Only when man is brought into the
condition of the publican facing the blaze of the holiness
and righteousness of God, or of the prodigal who in
coming to himself comes to hisfather. is he in a condi-
tion to become a child of God, to cry Abba Father, to
enter upon the work of God, to be co-worker with God
in His Kingdom One who has already prepared his
.
program and wants God to ratify it, who has already
found God and defined Him, who is bent on building
the Kingdom of God into the hearts of men with
modern techniques and the wisdom of science, will find
little in these sermons to please him, unless by the grace
of God the truth of the sermons will change his mind.
Man’s response to the gospel is the response of repent^
ance and of faith working in love through the patience
of hope. This is the beginning of life, of the abundant,
the eternal life.
Yes, here hope is inspired such as one finds nowhere
else excepting in God as revealed in the Scriptures for
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here an infinite vista is opened before the soul through
the prophets and the evangelists, a vista that ends in
eternity. Yes, here is power, the power of omnipotent
love given to man through Christ crucified, risen, glori-
fied. Yes, here is optimism, the optimism that is based
upon the abounding grace of God in Jesus Christ, from
THE TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE
which will come the new heavens and the new earth in
which dwelleth righteousness.
Again, the reader may be disappointed because he
does not find on these pages wise sayings or ingenious
pronouncements on the things that now disturb and in-
terest men, discussions of the problems of life from the
standpoint of common experience and in the light of the
highest moral and social values. One looks in vain
for sociological or political harangues, for literary mas-
terpieces captivating the cultured reader with their fas-
cinating rhetoric, for subtle theological speculations or
philosophical acumen based on recent scientific discov-
eries, for satisfactory explanations of the contradiction
between science and religion.
—
These sermons simply proclaim God, but not as a
static absolute far removed from the world, not as an
immanent essence entangled with the world they
;
preach the good news of God “in action,” of a living
person who is wholly other than the world and yet
Creator, Upholder of the universe, Savior and Sancti-
fier of men, as He is revealed in the prophets, incar-
nated in the Christ, working through His spirit in the
fellowship of believers, the Church. They proclaim
the purpose that has been in God through eternity and
is now made manifest in Christ, that in the end His will
of justice and love is to prevail as in heaven so upon
earth. This and this alone is assumed to be the power
—of God unto salvation unto all them that believe.
' 'Perhaps in sermons like these we may catch a glimpse
of what Spengler was groping after and could not find,
when he wrote:
“In this very century I prophesy, the century of
i
scientific-critical Alexandrianism, of the great harvests,