"We can indeed say that God hates sin but does not cease to
love the sinner [(Gott zwar die Sünde haßt, den Sünder zu lieben aber nicht aufhört)]. But it is only as we see God in Jesus Christ that we can
really say this. The faithfulness of God alone is the guarantee that in spite
of that alienation and failure and aberration, man does not perish and is not
destroyed. The grace of God alone is the power which can bring him back out of
that alienation and aberration and failure. What man himself does is totally
and exclusively a contradiction of the faithfulness and grace of God. This is
the truth of sin which we cannot compass in its frightfulness. Man is the good
creature of God, and nothing can change the fact that he is this and that God
is faithful and gracious to him as such. But he has made himself this alien and
stranger, he himself, within the limits set for him, who is not a second god,
by the faithfulness and grace of God. So, then, there is no place for any
distinction between himself as the neutral doer of sin, and sin as his evil
deed [(jener Unterscheidung zwischen sich selbst als einem neutralen Täter der Sünde und der Sünde als seiner bösen Tat)]. It was for him that Jesus Christ entered the lists, for him as the
creature that God had not forgotten or abandoned or given up or lost, but for
him himself who in sin as his own deed and therefore as the doer of it does
everything [(ihn selbst, der in der Sünde als seiner Tat und also als ihr Täter Alles tut)] to bring about his own destruction. He came to take up that case
which without Him, without the faithfulness and grace of God, would be lost, to
liberate the one who is altogether guilty before God from his guilt and its
consequences, to maintain God's right against the one who is wholly in the
wrong and in so doing to restore the human right which he had forfeited. Man
himself is 'in his sins.' What help to him is their forgiveness if he himself
is not helped? He himself needs renewal. He himself—this is how he is helped—is
the new man who has appeared in the obedience of Jesus Christ. But for this
very reason he himself is also the old man who has been judged and put to death
and removed, who has disappeared in the death of Jesus Christ; he himself is
the one who contradicts and opposes God; he himself is the one who thinks and
speaks and acts against his Creator and therefore his own creatureliness; he
himself is the one who by himself has estranged himself from himself. This is
the truth of sin. It does not consist only in the accusation: Thou hast done this,
but in the disclosure which comes to every man and points to the most inward
and proper being of every man: Thou art the man. We can, of course, evade the
accusation. The tissue of lies which enables us to do so can be sustained. And
where man is measured, or measures himself, by some other law, then even in the
best of cases the only result will be the accusation which he can and certainly
will evade. But this disclosure is something that we cannot evade. Now that
Jesus Christ has come, to represent the person of man in His own person, to
restore and renew the person of man and therefore man himself in His own
person, we are all of us disclosed as the man who in his own person is the man
of sin [(derjenige, der in seiner eigenen Person der Mensch der Sünde ist)]."
Karl Barth, CD
IV/1, 406-407 =KD IV/1, 450-451.
This occurs in the first subsection of §60, i.e. "1. The man of sin in
the light of the [(im Spiegel des)] obedience of the Son of God", and the
context is Barth’s long-running insistence that the fact that "man is evil,
that he is at odds with God and his neighbor, and therefore with himself" (359-360) can be known "from the Word of God" (361) alone, from "the death of
Jesus Christ on the cross" (360) and ultimately nowhere else. All other sources of the knowledge of sin
issue in a self-justifying attempt to absolve the man of the sins
he commits. Only from the Word of God on
the cross is it possible to learn that the man is a sinner.
And so the effect of Barth’s approach is actually to lay much greater
stress than wielders of the maxim typically do on the sin so profoundly characteristic
of both poles of the distinction:
2) the sinful acts we must abominate, to be sure, but also 1) the
sinfulness of the being or person (and also metaphysical and collective "man") we must love, the "man of sin", the one who is, to the very core of his being (and
therefore inescapably), a sinner. The fact that he was created in the image of
God must never become one of those "great truths" "behind" which "man usually
conceals the truth, or rather conceals himself from the truth" (403), which is that
he doesn’t just commit sins; he is "the man of sin". Again, "the truth of sin. . . . does not
consist only in the accusation: Thou
hast done this, but in the disclosure which comes to every man and points to
the most inward and proper being of every man:
Thou are the man" (407, italics mine). To take
refuge in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (which stresses rightly
that the maxim is not an offensive weapon to be directed primarily at others) is to miss this point. For the Publican recognizes what the Pharisee
does not: that "actions are not merely
external and accidental and isolated.
They are not, as it were, derailments.
A man is what he does. . . . They
are his wicked works and by them he is judged.
As the one who does them, who produces these wicked thoughts and words
and works, he is the man of sin" (405, italics mine). In all of these ways and more, Barth, it seems to me, actually radicalizes the maxim.
Walter Lippmann, Public opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 108 (chap. 8, "Blind spots and their value"). But progressivism (an obsession with material progress) is here one of those "stereotypes" that creates "blind spots", and blind spots cover "up some fact, which if . . . taken into account, would check the vital movement that the stereotype provokes." Their value is that they "keep away distracting images, which, with their attendant emotions, might cause hesitation and infirmity of purpose. Consequently the stereotype not only saves time in a busy life and is a defense of our position in society, but [unfortunately] tends [also] to preserve us from all the bewildering effect of trying to see the world whole steadily and see it whole" (114).
