“As a father discovers himself in his child” – Karl Barth

As you might have gathered from my recent posts on Barth’s Romans, I’m reading Barth’s commentary with our 4th year Bible/Theology majors in the capstone seminar for our major. It is my first sequential and complete reading of Barth’s Romans. It is a magesterial work in every sense. I’m finding it to be a difficult, frustrating and deeply profound work, and that usually is my feeling all within one paragraph. Today, I read a beautiful passage on grace:

Grace is the existence begotten by God, the new man, created and redeemed by God, the man who is righteous before Him and in whom He is well pleased, the man in whom God again discovers Himself, as a father discovers himself in his child (comment on 6:12-14, pg. 207, emphasis added)

I love that image of a father discovering himself in his child which Barth employs. This is something that I have come to understand especially in the last year. While I’m not going to say God discovers something about himself in us he had forgotten, at least not in the same way, there is perhaps something of that in his adoration of his children, and, particuarly, the redeemed. And this makes sense in light of experience.

As I pay close attention to my son Zion, I discover again myself. I come to understand and value myself. I praise the me God made. I stand in awe of him, but also of myself if I have eyes to see. How much I resemble him. How much I had forgotten of myself as I grew to adulthood. How revelatory. How redeeming. In Zion, I see the way I “was”; the way I was before sin took me out, cut me down and bent me.

There is a purity of insight into oneself through one’s child, if we only pay attention.

This is grace.