From time to time I attempt to pick Barth back up and see if there is anything I can understand. Occasionally it seems something makes sense. If I get this wrong, please don’t tell me, because this section I read in II.1 is just profound to me as I read it. (Allow me to wallow in my vast ignorance if I’ve read him wrong because how I’m seeing it is making a great impact on me today.)

Barth talks about being bound to God’s Word. We are bound to Christ. It is the Scriptures… but beyond the Scriptures. We are bound to the One who IS the Word of God. If we are bound to his Word, we are to begin with his existence. We are to start with the existence of God because he has made himself clear and certain to us. Barth then discusses with amazing clarity just how God is so certain. There is a certainty in his existence and that is something we can grasp. It is our anchor.

This causes us to be bound to him. We can no longer be without him. For Barth, it is the realization that we don’t want to be without him any more!

“Our own existence stands or falls with the existence of God.”

And just when there is something to grasp about the reality of God, and Barth gives me this certitude for my soul… he rips it away. (Well, not really. He just adds in a paradox.)

But precisely because that is so, precisely because God is He who makes Himself so clear and certain to us, we must now go further and say that He is the One who remains a mystery to us.

Got that? You have certitude… and now you have mystery. You MUST be certain of God… then you get the mystery. Got that?

The fact that we know God is His work and not ours. And the clarity and the certainty in which we know Him are His and not ours.

That is indeed a great mystery, but it a joyful mystery.

I’m going to act like I understand what Barth just said because somehow I think I might be getting what I think he’s saying. (Talk about mystery.)

He is the God who has made himself known to us. In this we rejoice. But the wonder is that we will never really know him as fully as possible. In that, we have a mystery. Yet, in that, we can rejoice.