Week 19—Thursday 2 Corinthians 2:14-17
Week 19—THURSDAY
“I’VE BEEN PERJURING MYSELF”
We continue yesterday’s discussion of preaching as testimony. I write this in Japan where Barthianism has taken hold of the ministers. But it is the old Barthianism, not the new. The old Barth would have nothing to do with experience—it savored of mysticism, which was anathema. The word of God was to be given as the pure word of God uncorrupted by our experience. It was apart from and beyond experience. Barth was asked by Harnack, “Have you ever thought of the humanity of God?” and Barth replied decisively, Nein—No! So the gospel according to Barth became the Pure Word become pure word. Then Barth saw his mistake and wrote a book in 1956 on the humanity of God—the Word became flesh. But most of Barth’s followers are following the Barth of the Word became word with its resultant words which have lost contact with reality and hence their vitality.
A famous Hindu swami wrote in a book for a friend, “I am pure, I am humble, I am mighty, I am charitable, I have orphanages and dispensaries.” When the friend objected, the Hindu said: “Didn’t Jesus say, I am the light of the world, I am the way? I, too, am God and I can say it.” The difference? One was the Word become word and the other was the Word become flesh.
A theological student came to a friend of mine and said, “I’ve been perjuring myself. I’ve been preaching things not operative within me. I’m through with this unreality. I’ll give God till Sunday to do something for me. And if God doesn’t do something for me before Sunday, someone else can preach. I won’t.” He took Saturday off as a day of retreat. God met him, was waiting for him. He went into the pulpit a new man. The congregation filed in to listen to the old words. They got the shock of their lives. They had a new minister. The whole congregation found themselves seeking what their young minister had found. The Word had become flesh.
O Blessed Redeemer, redeem me from words out of which the content has dropped. Give me reality, your kind of reality, and thus may my words and my life be one! I thank you, thank you for this blessed conversion. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am prisoner of a vocabulary. Give me a new vocabulary to express a new vitality.