Paul Chung on Barth again, this time on on the ecclesial-political form of life appropriate to our participation in the apocalyptic history of Jesus:
“In respect to the establishment of God’s lordship in Jesus Christ on earth, there is no place for us to remain neutral, nonparticipants, or merely spectators toward others and ourselves. In protest and opposition to the unreconciled world and the reality of nothingness, we are called to be living participants in the prophetic history of Jesus Christ. Human beings under the grace of reconciliation are free ‘to live in contact, solidarity and fellowship’ with God as well as with the reconciled world. Therefore we live ‘as companions in the partnership of reconciliation, as brothers and sisters in the fulfilled covenant of God.’ Human beings under the glad tidings of reconciliation can live and work ‘in contact, solidarity, and fellowship both vertically and horizontally’.
In fact, it is impossible to have the attitude of an ostrich, burying one’s head in the sand. This prophetic history of Jesus Christ can be depicted and understood eschatologically as the supratemporal, transcendent future that has not yet arrived but has begun with Jesus Christ. In other words, a biblical and eschatological perspective tells us about the present irruption of God’s future, or the advent of the new human being here and now, or the present passing of the old reality, the disruptive truth of the new and true reality.”
Paul S. Chung, Karl Barth: God’s Word in Action (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, Forthcoming). 370.
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