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Karl Barth's Christological Basis for the State and Political Praxis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
It would appear that one is an apostle of the obvious when speaking of Karl Barth's ‘christological basis’ for the state. According to G. C. Berkouwer, amongst others, to say Karl Barth is to mean simultaneously ‘christocentricism’, especially when speaking of Barth after his deliberate reversal in his dogmatics published in 1932—the date Barth published his Kirchliche Dogmatik after he discontinued writing his Christliche Dogmatik begun in 1927, which he later described as ‘my well-known false start’. But even Berkouwer, who criticises Barth for underplaying the demonic effects and influences of evil through his emphasis on grace, admits that Barth's ‘christocentricism’ has epistemological emphases not found in other theologians:
… Barth underscores with increasing emphasis that all knowledge of God is exclusively determined by and is dependent upon the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and that this is not simply a matter of our epistemology, but that it is directly related to the nature of God in Jesus Christ who is the dominant and all-controlling central factor in the doctrines of election, creation, and reconciliation. Only in Jesus Christ do we meet the true and decisive revelation of God.
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References
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