Missing the mark; that’s what sin is, or so I was told in Sunday school. To be sure, it is ‘missing the mark,’ but what or who is the mark? All too often people, Christian and Heathen alike, presume to know what sin is; as if there is a self-understood, perceived standard for knowing what the depths of righteousness entails. That is, there is this notion that we inherently know what sin is by our own lights; as if we as a societas have the inner-Übermensch to stand outside ourselves, on our own self-generated will power, to look back at ourselves, the world, embedded in an unrighteousness, and name it as such. But this is to presume that humanity inhabits a pura natura (pure nature) wherein there remains a divine spark that allows humanity to operate as its own Deus ex machina, capable of self-salvation through its incalculable power and indominable ‘holy’ spirit of self-governance. And yet this is to beg the question: is it really nature after all, imbued with its own eternal law, albeit gifted by God’s voluntas, that brings God-knowledge as the person negates self-knowledge as if the self is merely a mirror reflection of the divine (so, an always already present analogia entis)?

Barth shouts a resounding NEIN! Barth properly argues that there can be no proper knowledge of sin without first a proper knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. Otherwise, if an abstract knowledge of sin could be known, then as corollary, an abstract knowledge of God and a subsequent salvation could obtain. If the sinner could properly search the depths of the human, the fallen heart, it would be conceivable that they alone have the attributes of the Christian God, and as such, could prescribe their own way of salvation. Some might even think of this abstract way of salvation and naming of sin as what has come to be called: secularism. But as is the case with modernity and other epistemic frames of reference, its antecedent ideation has a source, particularly in the West, in and from the various Christian theological syntheses afoot. Barth rightly argues that it is the theologians of the purported ‘neutral god’, the notion of godness synthesized with various and ostensible Christian expressions of purported dogmatic articulations of the Holy and triune God, that has led to the secular religion, both in the church and outside, that we swim in today.

Barth writes (at length):

But this knowledge of real sin takes place in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Why in this knowledge? We will first give the comprehensive answer: Because the God against whom the man of sin contends has judged this man, and therefore myself as this man, in the self-offering and death of Jesus Christ His own Son, putting him to death, and destroying him; and because He has revealed and continually reveals him as this one who is judged and put to death and destroyed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and His being and living and speaking and witness for all ages. Because the verdict passed in His resurrection from the dead unmasks this old man, showing that every man is before God, and therefore what I myself am before Him, the man who is judged and put to death and destroyed. All this came upon Jesus Christ for every one of us and therefore for me, in our place and therefore in my place. We are all those and that of which God Himself made an end in Jesus Christ, which transferred to the past in Jesus Christ. We are all wearers of the old garment which was there taken off and destroyed. Indeed, we are all the old man himself who there in Jesus Christ was overtaken by the wrath of God and condemned and executed. Jesus Christ suffered and died in our place, in solidarity with this old man and therefore with us, without any clever reservation in respect of a secret innocence or freedom or capacity for redemption which might be maintained and ascribed to this man and therefore to us; without any contradiction or protest as though what was happening to this old man and therefore to us in this judgment was unjust; without any control over the grace of God, which surely could not be too severe; without reckoning on any sudden turn in His favour, simply in hope in God, but in that hope only in the form of obedience in which Jesus Christ allowed that God was in the right and He Himself—and therefore the old man and ourselves whose place He had taken—in the wrong, taking it upon Himself to be one with us, and as such to suffer what our acts and we ourselves had deserved before God. Because He is the One who has done this for us, the verdict of God passed in His resurrection and revealed in His being and living and speaking and witness is relevant to all men and therefore to ourselves as we have described it in a first approximation. As the verdict of God it has this complete and comprehensive content, including ourselves and our activity and being, and excluding any conceivable possibility of self-excuse and self-justification. And as the verdict of God it has the authority of His own direct and personal self-knowledge as the basis of what is now our true self-knowledge—true because in the self-knowledge which has this basis we cannot turn to any other revelation of God, to any God in a more original form, to any faith in such a form of God, attaining there to what is supposed to be a better knowledge of ourselves. In this verdict we learn what God knows about us, and therefore how it really is with us. For this reason its content is valid. For this reason, when we hear it, we have no option but to receive it and accept its validity.[1]

Let the self be damned, for sure it has been in the death and burial of Jesus Christ; and elevated afresh anew in the resurrection and ascension of the Son of Man for all of humanity as humanity in Himself. We will never know what we genuinely need to know outwith inhabiting the bosom of the Father in union with the eternal Son of God, who is the Christ, who is the man, Jesus, son of David, from the hinterparts, of Nazareth in the Galilee.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [391] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 34–5.