The Foundation for Reformed Theology

Calvin
John Calvin
(1509-1564)
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§ 28, The Being of God as the One Who Loves in Freedom
§ 29, The Perfections of God
§ 30, The Perfections of the Divine Loving
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I apologize that I have fallen behind in my reading. Perhaps the rest of you have continued on. At any rate, here are a few reading notes on Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics, Volume II, "The Doctrine of God," Chapter VI, "The Reality of God."

This is part of an ongoing series of once-per-month emails accompanying our plan to read through Barth's Dogmatics in 2010-2012.

 

 � 28, The Being of God as the One Who Loves in Freedom


God is who He is in the act of His revelation. God seeks and creates fellowship between Himself and us, and therefore He loves us. But He is this loving God without us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the freedom of the Lord, who has His life from Himself.

 

1. The Being of God in Act (II.1, 257)

 

"God is. This is the simple statement which we have to develop and explain in this chapter on the basis and in the application of what we have learnt in the previous chapter about the fulfilment, the possibility, and the limits of our knowledge of God. In so doing we confront the hardest and at the same time the most extensive task of Church dogmatics, behind which also there lies concealed the hardest and at the same time the most extensive task of the whole of Christian preaching. The task consists in defining the subject of all the statements that are here necessary and possible." (II.1, 257, emphasis added)

 

"Dogmatics, in each and all of its divisions and subdivisions, with every one of its questions and answers, with all its biblical and historical assertions, with the whole range of its formal and material considerations, examinations and condensations, can first and last, as a whole and in part, say nothing else but that God is. . . .

 "This is the case because the Church too, whose commission the science of dogmatics has to serve in its own sphere and manner, lives by the fact and only by the fact that it can hear the word that God is, and because first and last it has this and only this to say to itself and the world in the execution of its commission--the fact that God is." (II.1, 258, emphasis added)

 

[Again and again, the church exists and lives by and only by hearing the word of God. We do not live by the crown, we do not live by the sword, we do not live by the economy, we do not live by human effort--we live by and only by hearing the word of God. We have to preach the gospel and we have to hear the gospel; apart from that, we are nothing. Therefore, let us do this one thing as faithfully as we can: preach and hear the gospel.]

 

"We cannot for a moment turn our thoughts anywhere else than to God's act in His revelation. We cannot for a moment start from anywhere else than from there. . . .

 "What God is as God, the divine individuality and characteristics, the essentia or 'essence' of God, is something which we shall encounter either at the place where God deals with us as Lord and Saviour, or not at all. The act of revelation as such carries with it the fact that God has not withheld Himself to me as true being, but that He has given no less than Himself to men as the overcoming of their need, and light in their darkness--Himself as the Father in His own Son by the Holy Spirit." (II.1, 261-262, emphasis added)

 

[God is not deceitful. God reveals himself to us truthfully. God's revelation of himself is none other than himself.]

 

"What is concerned is always the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, always His justification of faith, always His lordship in the Church, always His coming again, and therefore Himself as our hope. . . . And in this very event God is who He is. God is He who in this event is subject, predicate and object; the revealer, the act of revelation, the revealed; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is the Lord active in this event. . . . We are dealing with the being of God: but with regard to the being of God, the word 'event' or 'act' is final, and cannot be surpassed or compromised. To its very deepest depths God's Godhead consists in the fact that it is an event-not any event, not events in general, but the event of His action, in which we have a share in God's revelation." (II.1, 262-263)

 

[God is who he is as he reveals himself in the act of his lordship and in the event of our salvation. Because God is truthful, there is not some other God hidden behind this lordship and this salvation.]

 

"The definition that we must use as a starting-point is that God's being is life. Only the Living is God. Only the voice of the Living is God's voice. Only the work of the Living is God's work; only the worship and fellowship of the Living is God's worship and fellowship. So, too, only the knowledge of the Living is knowledge of God." (II.1, 263)

 

2. The Being of God as the One Who Loves (II.1, 272)

 

"God is He who, without having to do so, seeks and creates fellowship between Himself and us." (II.1, 273)

 

"1. God's loving is concerned with a seeking and creation of fellowship for its own sake." (II.1, 276)

 

"2. God's loving is concerned with a seeking and creation of fellowship without any reference to an existing aptitude or worthiness on the part of the loved." (II.1, 278)

 

"3. God's loving is an end in itself." (II.1, 279)

 

"4. God's loving is necessary, for it is the being, the essence and the nature of God. But for this very reason it is also free from every necessity in respect of its object . . . God does not owe us either our being, or in our being His love." (II.1, 280-281)

 

[See, again and again, the emphasis on the freedom of God.]

 

"The One who (in His own way) loves us, who (in His own way) seeks and creates fellowship between Himself and us, also informs us what a person is, in that (in His own way! not as if we knew of ourselves what it is, but in such a way that we now come to recognise it for the first time) He acts as a person. The definition of a person-that is, a knowing, willing, acting I-can have the meaning only of a confession of the person of God declared in His revelation, of the One who loves and who as such (loving in His own way) is the person." (II.1, 284, emphasis added)

 

[That is to say, not only does God reveal himself to us, but he also reveals to us who we are. We do not know who we are apart from this revelation, apart from him.]

 

"The One, the person, whom we really know as a human person, is the person of Jesus Christ, and even this is in fact the person of God the Son, in which humanity, without being or having itself a person, is caught up into fellowship with the personality of God. This one man is therefore the being of God making itself known to us as the One who loves." (II.1, 286)

 

3. The Being of God in Freedom (II.1, 297)

 

"The being of God is His own. His act is His own. His love is His own. In this His being and act God is who He is." (II.1, 297)

 

"God's being as He who lives and loves is being in freedom. In this way, freely, He lives and loves. And in this way, and in the fact that He lives and loves in freedom, He is God, and distinguishes Himself from everything else that lives and loves. . . . There are other sovereignties, but freedom is the prerogative of divine sovereignty. Freedom is, of course, more than the absence of limits, restrictions, or conditions. . . . Freedom in its positive and proper qualities means to be grounded in one's own being, to be determined and moved by oneself. This is the freedom of the divine life and love. . . . He is the free Creator, the free Reconciler, the free Redeemer. . . . He is Himself is power, truth and right." (II.1, 301)

 

"There is no caprice about the freedom of God." (II.1, 318)

 

"Jesus Christ alone must be preached to the heathen as the immanent God, and the Church must be severely vigilant to see that it expects everything from Jesus Christ, and from Jesus Christ everything; that he is unceasingly recognised as the way, the truth, and the life. . . . The freedom of God must be recognised as His own freedom and this means-as it consists in God and as God has exercised it. But in God it consists in His Son Jesus Christ, and it is in Him that God has exercised it." (II.1, 319-320)

(II.1, 258, emphasis added)

 

 

� 29, The Perfections of God

 

God lives His perfect life in the abundance of many individual and distinct perfections. Each of these is perfect in itself and in combination with all the others. For whether it is a form of love in which God is free, or a form of freedom in which God loves, it is nothing else but God Himself, His one, simple distinctive being.

 

"God's being consists in the fact that He is the One who loves in freedom. In this He is the perfect being: the being which is itself perfection and so the standard of all perfection; the being, that is, which is self-sufficient and thus adequate to meet every real need; the being which suffers no lack in itself and by its very essence fills every real lack. Such a being is God." (II.1., 322)

 

"Since God is Father, Son and Holy Ghost, i.e., loves in freedom, every perfection exists essentially in him." (II.1, 323)

 

"In God's revelation the disclosure of God is in fact the first and the last, the origin and the end, of the ways of God. God's revelation is first and last a Gospel, glad tidings, the word and dead of divine grace." (II.1, 349)


� 30, The Perfections of the Divine Loving


The divinity of the love of God consists and confirms itself in the fact that in Himself and in all His works God is gracious, merciful and patient, and at the same time holy, righteous and wise.

 

1. The Grace and Holiness of God (II.1, 351)

 

"God is He who is His Son Jesus Christ loves all His children, in His children all men, and in men His whole creation. God's being is His loving. He is all that He is as the One who loves. All His perfections are the perfections of His love." (II.1, 351)

 

"When God loves, revealing His inmost being in the fact that he loves and therefore seeks and creates fellowship, this being and doing is divine and distinct from all other loving to the extend that the love of God is grace. Grace is the distinctive mode of God's being in so far as it seeks and creates fellowship by its own free inclination and favour, unconditioned by any merit or claim in the beloved, but also unhindered by any unworthiness or opposition in the latter-able, on the contrary, to overcome all unworthiness and opposition. It is in this distinctive characteristic that we recognise the divinity of God's love. (II.1, 353)

 

"The holiness of God consists in the unity of His judgment with His grace. God is holy because His grace judges and His judgment is gracious." (II.1, 363)

 

2. The Mercy and Righteousness of God (II.1, 368)

 

"Faith in God's righteousness means necessarily and essentially a choice and decision in favour of His righteousness as opposed to our own; in other words, the choice and decision by which instead of our own righteousness we accept as our own the righteousness of God, or, according to the shorter New Testament definition, of Christ." (II.1, 386)

 

"The meaning of the death of Jesus Christ is that there God's condemning and punishing righteousness broke out, really smiting and piercing human sin, man as sinner, and sinful Israel. . . . Yet it did so in such a way that it did not happen to Israel or to us, but for Israel and for us." (II.1, 396)

 

3. The Patience and Wisdom of God (II.1, 406)

 

"The idea of the patience of God express an enrichment, a clarification and an intensification of the idea of His mercy, which is itself to be understood in an active and dynamic sense. . . . He suffers for it." (II.1, 411)

 

"The meaning of the divine patience is a summons to faith." (II.1, 419, emphasis added)

 

"God Himself is wisdom. . . .

. . . God is glorious in His wisdom. He attests Himself as God by attesting His wisdom" (II.1, 426)


Jim GoodloeGrace and Peace,
 
             Jim
Dr. James C. Goodloe IV, Executive Director
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