I have a large library for one person.  Perhaps that’s what happens to pastors after a few decades.  A couple of years ago I gleaned my library and probably reduced it by a quarter of the books I had and I still had full shelves.  I’m not sure how that happened, but it did.  Okay, I’m a bibliophile.  There I said it.  I admitted it.  Now for recovery.  Problem is, I have some books in my “saved for later” category on Amazon. 

Of my books, I have a few full sets of the writings of certain authors that I find rich, insightful and relevant.  One of those authors is last century’s prolific neo-orthodox Swiss theologian, Karl Barth.  I have not read all of his work, but enough of it to realize he sometimes has sentences longer than most people’s paragraphs.  He was instrumental in the Church’s resistance to Nazism in Europe during WW 2 and was the primary author of the Barmen Declaration, the Confessing Church’s dialectic statement of faith with a resounding “Yes!” to God’s sovereign Lordship and an equally resounding “No” to human idolatry in it’s many forms.  But he’s probably most famous for his answer to the question he was asked toward the end of his life.  The question was something like “If you could summarize all of your work, what would the summary be?” And his response was “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

That’s quiet the distillation of thousands of pages of theological reflection and insight, but he’s right.  I’d think that many Christian writers and theologians could say the same thing. 

So why all the words?  After reading Barth if I was to answer that question, I’d say that every word was necessary.  Which for someone who has read Barth, that’s hard to believe I’m saying.  There are times when I read his work and it takes me a few passes before I even begin to get what he’s saying, but when I do then it’s like I’ve been given night-vision goggles and I am seeing things that I had previously not seen.  And if I try to restate in fewer words what he said, then something is lost.  Hence, every word seems necessary. 

Here’s an example I ran across recently (a remarkably short sentence for Barth!): “The principle of necessary repetition and renewal, and not a law of stability, is the law of the spiritual growth and continuity of our life.”

(Karl Barth CD II/2, § 36, p 647)

It’s one of the easier things to figure out what he’s saying, which is basically that we each must continue to grow spiritually through learning the same lessons over and over again and reapplying them in new ways, that getting to a certain point spiritually and staying there does not produce the kind of spiritual life that we are offered. 

The problem with all those words is that they make it difficult for most of us to see his point.  And what he said is powerfully rich and engaging.  He was insightful in ways that I didn’t even realize someone could be insightful.  He illuminates the Christian life and the incredible love of God revealed in Jesus Christ in ways that are liberating and mind-blowing.  Yet there is an equally amazing simplicity to what he’s saying.  I don’t know exactly how, but there is.  Consequently, he could say what he said toward the end of his life about what it all meant: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Which brings me to the other reason Barth wrote so much and used so many words to convey his insights and thoughts: Because the love that Barth knew in Jesus Christ couldn’t stop with one sentence or description.  Like those who are deeply in love, there’s a necessity to keep describing it, displaying it, expressing it.  Barth (and others, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer) were not willing to simply run the race of faith by grabbing the baton of tradition from the previous generation and delivering it to the next.  Instead he expressed it for his context.  His running with the baton was unique and yet conformed to the Gospel.

I’m writing this, not to convert anyone to a Barthian or to suggest you even look him up on Wikipedia.  Instead, I write it because I think it is necessary for each generation, even each person to restate the message of the Gospel from one’s own perspective and context.  It is from our unique context and our unique expression of the Gospel that God speaks to our generation’s own idolatry and calls us home.  And in doing so, like Barth, we should be able to distill it into “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,” but only as we continue to repeat and renew, since that is the law of the spiritual growth and continuity of our life.

© Stephen Carl