Saturday, December 8. 2018
It is the mystery of revelation that our dogma describes.
If revelation is a mystery and is understood as such, then it is at least possible in principle for the necessity of it to begin shining through.
But now we must emphasize the fact that it is the description of this mystery that is the purpose of the dogma.
Objections might, of course, be raised to what we have said up till now.
Is acknowledgment and confession of this mystery of the divine origin of the person of Jesus Christ completely tied up with acknowledgment and confession of the Virgin birth in particular?
Is the form in which we speak here of this mystery as if it were the content of it inseparable from this content, or this content from this form?
Must it not be left to Christian liberty or even to the historical judgment of the individual whether he can and will acknowledge and confess this content in precisely this form?
To this the answer is that the doctrine of the Virgin birth is merely the description and therefore the form by and in which the mystery is spoken of in the New Testament and in the creeds.
Similarly we might say that so far as the New Testament witness to Easter is the account of the empty grave, it merely describes the mystery, or the revelation of the mystery, “Christ is risen.”
It describes it by pointing to this external fact.
No one will dream of claiming that this external fact in itself and as such had the power to unveil for the disciples the veiled fact that, “God was in Christ.”
But was it revealed to them otherwise than by the sign of this external fact?
Will there be real faith in the resurrection of the Lord as revealing His mystery, as unveiling His divine glory, where the account of the empty grave is thought to be excisable as the mere form of the content in question, or where it can be left to Christian liberty to confess seriously and decisively the content alone?
With this form are we not also bound in fact to lose the specific content of the Easter message for some other truth about the resurrection?
Sign and thing signified, the outward and the inward, are, as a rule, strictly distinguished in the Bible, and certainly in other connections we cannot lay sufficient stress upon the distinction.
But they are never separated in such a (“liberal”) way that according to preference the one may be easily retained without the other.
from Karl Barth, “The Miracle of Christmas”, Church Dogmatics I.2, page 178-179
