On Preaching

I'm pretty sure that it is dangerous to quote Barth in snippets. His writing and thinking, his argument, is always complete only in thinking through the paragraphs as units. However, for the purposes of this blog, which is really just a log of reading through Church Dogmatics, snippets are brilliant.

Writing about the proclamation and announcement of the promise that God has given to the Church, Barth says this:

"It must be homily, i.e., discourse which as the exposition of Scripture is controlled and guided. But if it is to be real repetition of this promise, it cannot consist in the mere reading of Scripture or in repeating and paraphrasing the actual wording of the biblical witness. This can be only its presupposition. The concrete encounter of God and man to-day, whose actuality, of course, can be created only by the Word of God Himself, must find a couterpart in the human event of proclamation, i.e., the person called must be ready to make the promise given to the Church intelligible in his own words to the men of his own time. Calling, promise, exposition of Scripture, actuality - these are the decisive definitions of the concept of preaching." CD I.1, p59