So often we hear our con­text described as post-​​modern, post-​​liberal, post-​​Christian, or the like. Despite the image of col­lapse, the lan­guage dis­plays a cer­tain dose of Cana­dian humil­ity and polite­ness: we don’t quite know yet what has really hap­pened, but we sense that the shift beneath our feet has been seis­mic. Church lead­ers will want to pay atten­tion to these attempts at descrip­tion and analy­ses; we need accu­rate cul­tural maps to nav­i­gate our min­istry. Yet, what is often for­got­ten amidst all the con­fu­sion, both by the tra­di­tional as well as the emerg­ing churches, is the biblical-​​theological claim that the gospel of God’s com­ing king­dom presents us with pro­found images of some­thing so fun­da­men­tally new that every pre­vi­ous cat­e­gory of descrip­tion and ori­en­ta­tion col­lapses in its presence.

In his pro­gram­matic essay “The Strange New World of the Bible [1917]” (Barth 1957), Barth asked: What do we find in the Bible: His­tory? Moral­ity? Reli­gion? He answered that in the Bible a strange new world opens up and projects itself into our ordi­nary world. As such it is not some­thing appear­ing on the mar­gins of cul­ture. The Bible tes­ti­fies to a his­tory with its own dis­tinct grounds and pos­si­bil­i­ties, a wholly dif­fer­ent king­dom with its own moral logic and pol­i­tics. Faith can­not be traced to any his­tor­i­cal foun­da­tions. The Bible does not con­cern itself with our moral­ity, our know­ing and our piety, but God as God, God’s his­tory and God’s reign. Accord­ing to Barth, this focus does not lead us away from this world. On the con­trary, it leads us deeper into the truth of this world. The Bible does not offer thoughts about a dis­tant God, but rather wit­nesses to the divine per­spec­tive on human­ity and the world. It tes­ti­fies that God in Christ is estab­lish­ing a new real­ity, a new heaven and a new earth, and that the Holy Spirit “will not stop nor stay until all that is dead has been brought to life and a new world has come into being” (Barth 1957, 50).

These are the reflec­tions of a young Swiss pas­tor who strug­gled with the task of preach­ing the new real­ity in a world that was col­laps­ing around him. In these reflec­tions, Barth began to iden­tify the con­tours of that “really” new world, as well as the crit­i­cal the­o­log­i­cal and hermeneu­ti­cal tools which, I believe, are still of ser­vice as we seek to ori­ent our own churches, almost one hun­dred years later, in a post-​​modern, post-​​Christendom context.

Barth’s break with the lib­eral Protes­tantism of his teach­ers and his the­o­log­i­cal re-​​orientation in the early part of the last cen­tury can, at one level, be sum­ma­rized sim­ply as a shift “back to the Bible.” As is so often the case, re-​​orientation came through cri­sis; Karl Barth was one of only a few young pas­tors who was pro­foundly dis­turbed by the fact that the churches and their the­olo­gians were iden­ti­fy­ing Chris­tian­ity almost com­pletely with the cause of their own nation. This mod­ern syn­cretism shocked these young preach­ers “back to the Bible”, a major shift in the­ol­ogy, which Lesslie New­bi­gin iden­ti­fied as a search for a new form of Chris­t­ian pres­ence in Europe for the 20^th cen­tury (New­bi­gin 1989, 196).

What New­bi­gin does not make suf­fi­ciently clear is that this was, above all, a hermeneu­ti­cal shift. The cru­cial ele­ment in Barth’s new the­o­log­i­cal foun­da­tion and ori­en­ta­tion for the church was the dis­cov­ery of that escha­to­log­i­cal real­ity, the “strange new world,” wit­nessed to in the Bible.

What does the Bible offer if not his­tor­i­cal, moral or reli­gious facts and insights? It wit­nesses to the ulti­mate con­crete real­ity, namely the in-​​breaking escha­to­log­i­cal real­ity of the risen and liv­ing Christ and his reign. This real­ity is utterly for­eign to the mun­dane world which we cre­ate, shape and mea­sure with our empir­i­cal tools. It is a per­sonal real­ity that actively inter­rupts the set­tled con­ti­nu­ities of our life and draws us and every­thing else into its sphere through judge­ment and grace.

No one who has read Barth’s early writ­ings (espe­cially in the orig­i­nal Ger­man!) is left unmoved by the excited, expres­sion­is­tic char­ac­ter of Barth’s lan­guage, dis­cov­er­ing and breath­lessly sketch­ing draft after draft of a very dif­fer­ent inter­ac­tive map which depicts a world imme­di­ately present to all, but one which only a few are truly see­ing. Barth writes in a ser­mon from this early period, that God is no …

… strange word on the mar­gins of exis­tence, but exis­tence itself, which breaks forth pow­er­fully through every­thing that is with­out being. No fifth wheel on the wagon, but the wheel that dri­ves all wheels. No sanc­tu­ary on the periph­ery, but the one who enters might­ily into the midst of all that is. No dark, mys­te­ri­ous power … but the clear power of free­dom which is above all and in all and seeks to be hon­oured through human beings. No thought or notion, but the power of life that con­quers the pow­ers of death …! No dec­o­ra­tive embell­ish­ment of the world, but a lever that moves the world! … A liv­ing God; that is what liv­ing means! A God who is really God! (Barth 1999: 276f.)

God is God. Early, and then relent­lessly, Barth put his fin­ger on the prob­lem of mod­ern the­ol­ogy: Chris­t­ian faith is “entirely and com­pletely escha­tol­ogy” (Barth 1968: 314), that is, it is caught up in and ori­ented to the com­ing reign of God. Christendom’s escha­tol­ogy, by com­par­i­son, is a real­ized escha­tol­ogy where the King­dom of God is iden­ti­fied with the struc­tures of this world which we build and extend. For Barth, how­ever, God’s reign is a com­ing real­ity which deter­mines what ulti­mately counts as real and what does not, what is finally mar­ginal and des­tined for destruc­tion and what is essen­tial. This means that this strange, new escha­to­log­i­cal real­ity has onto­log­i­cal and epis­te­mo­log­i­cal pri­or­ity over our com­monly shared expe­ri­en­tial real­ity, includ­ing the church’s present expe­ri­ence of mar­gin­al­ity. In other words God’s in-​​breaking king­dom deter­mines and reveals what is actu­ally real and this might con­tra­dict present appearances.

The the­o­log­i­cal task is there­fore twofold. First, the church must be true to the escha­to­log­i­cal real­ity to which scrip­ture wit­nesses. This requires a sus­tained lis­ten­ing to the bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive of the com­ing of God’s reign. Back to the Bible! When we fol­low this advice, we will real­ize in new ways just how alive God actu­ally is (Barth 1999: 276f.). Accord­ing to Barth, this is the start­ing point for good Chris­t­ian theology.

The sec­ond task is to inter­pret all of our indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences and our shared pub­lic real­ity through the frame­work pro­vided by the escha­to­log­i­cal real­ity of God’s in-​​breaking reign. This entails plac­ing what we know to be true by expe­ri­ence and reflec­tion, using the tools of soci­ol­ogy, anthro­pol­ogy or psy­chol­ogy, into the world of mean­ing which God’s reign cre­ates. In short, the logic of this “strange new world of the Bible” requires that we turn our con­cep­tual machin­ery upside-​​down. Every­thing which we expe­ri­ence of the world is to be placed into the inter­pre­ta­tive frame of ref­er­ence of Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions (that is, in light of that com­ing, escha­to­log­i­cal reality).

In this way Karl Barth chal­lenged the accom­mo­da­tion of Chris­t­ian the­ol­ogy to the pre­sumed con­di­tions of truth­ful speech deter­mined by the world. Barth’s achieve­ment is a recov­ery of the gram­mar of Chris­t­ian speech. He refuses to sep­a­rate our most fun­da­men­tal Chris­t­ian con­fes­sion of Jesus as the Mes­siah, as Lord and Sav­iour, as the Com­ing One, from how we describe all of God’s good cre­ation and how we ori­ent our lives eth­i­cally. In this sense Barth’s “school,” in my opin­ion, con­tin­ues to offer the best avail­able train­ing for dis­cov­er­ing that strange new world of the Bible and for train­ing Chris­tians how to employ Chris­t­ian speech con­fi­dently and with integrity in the strange world of the twenty-​​first century.

Bib­li­og­ra­phy

• Barth, Karl. 1999. “12. August: Psalm 42,2–6, ‘Wo ist nun dein Gott?’” In Predigten 1917, ed. H. Schmidt, 269–282. Zurich: TVZ Verlag.
• _​_​_​_​_​_​_​ . 1968. Epis­tle to the Romans. Tr. C. Hoskins. Lon­don: Oxford University.
• _​_​_​_​_​_​_​ . 1957. “The Strange New World Within the Bible” (1916). In The Word of God and the Word of Man, tr. D. Hor­ton, 28–50. New York: Harper Torch­books, 1957.
• New­bi­gin, Lesslie. 1989. The Gospel in a Plu­ral­ist Soci­ety. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.