The Scandal of Jesus

The Barth “hits” keep coming . . .

This one, however, maybe the most significant thing I’ve read about Jesus in a very long while. In a section on Romans 8:3-4 in an exposition of the clause “God sent his own son in the likeness of sin-controlled flesh” (notice Barth’s paraphrase) Barth speaks of God’s “impenetrable incognito” in Jesus.

It is a movingly profound critique of the attempt to do a historical Jesus study, that is, one which can serve the theology of the church. His final statement about Jesus is both startling, vividly worded and haunting:

Is there any historical occurrence so defenceless against brilliant and stupid notions, against the interpretations and misinterpretations, against use and misuse; is there any historical happening so inconspicuous and ambiguous and open to misunderstanding—as the appearance in history of God’s own son? There is no single incident in His life known to us in such a way as to be free from ambiguity and free from the possibility of giving offence. A hundred incidents are manifestly offensive: so much so that modern theologians blurt out awkwardly and with touching simplicity: ‘Here we fell otherwise than Jesus felt’—a truth so desperately obvious that one would have thought it hardly worth while mentioning. Sin-controlled flesh: human, worldly, historical, natural, scintillating with every variation of ambiguity, a playground where men can exercise their ingenuity in propounding all manner of noble and assured ideas and notions, but a playground so covered with stones that each man stumbles after his own fashion—such is the life of Jesus, more than any other life. And it must needs be so. Blasphemy is not the stumbling-block that we all—some here, some there—discover in the life of Jesus. We stumble when we suppose that we can treat of Him, speak of Him—WITHOUT BEING SCANDALIZED.  (280)