Karl Barth the Preacher (10): Sent out to speak God’s Word
This faithfulness to God and to Scripture always carries within it the wider dimension of the church’s faithfulness to the world: ‘The community of Jesus Christ is for the world… In this way, it also exists for God, for the Creator and Lord of the world’ (Church Dogmatics, IV.3, (Edinburgh, 1962), 762). When Barth uses the word ‘Church’, he has in mind this idea of the community of Jesus Christ, ‘the society of men called to believe in, and simultaneously to testify to, the Word in the world’ (Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, 37). He stresses that there is always the question of ‘how far that which is called the Church, and claims, and seems to be the Church, is really the true Church’ (Church Dogmatics, IV.2, (Edinburgh, 1958), 641). Recognizing that the word ‘Church’ is an ‘overburdened word’, he stresses that’ it ‘should be immediately and consistently interpreted by the word “community”, the community of Jesus Christ, the community which is called to both hear and speak the Word of God (Evangelical Theology: An introduction, 37).
