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THE TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE

These sermons were prepared from 1920 to 1924. Professor Barth preached some of them while he was minister of the Reformed congregation in Safenwil, Canton Aargau, Switzerland; others in the Reformed Church in Göttingen while he was professor of theology in the University. Pastor Thurneysen at that time preached to the congregation in Bruggen, near St. Gall, Switzerland. The sermons were written not for special occasions but for the regular Sunday morning service, and were addressed to such men and women as one will find in any village or city church—to men and women in the struggle for life, waiting and seeking for God.

Pastor Thurneysen selected the sermons and arranged them according to a scheme that may be indicated by the words Promise, Christ, Christian Living. These titles, however, do not appear either in the table of contents or in the context. The motive of the sequence of the sermons is suggested by the choice of texts. For the first six sermons these are taken from the Old Testament—from the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah; for the next eleven sermons, from the New Testament, six from the Gospels and five from the Epistles; for the last eight, one from the Epistle to the Philippians and seven from the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. The sermons are, therefore, to be considered as forming an organic whole setting forth the different aspects of the Word of God in prophecy, in the Christ, in the Christian. Their sequence is not logical, nor biological, but theological, Christological, soteriological.

Four editions in German have been published. This is the first volume of sermons from the Barthian school to appear in English. The translators found it difficult to put into clear, fluent English the distinctive thought, the paradoxical statements, and the idioms of the original text. They tried to be true to the authors, to the content of their discourses, and to the English reader. To what extent they have succeeded the reader will have to determine.

These sermons are not popular, clever, eloquent pulpit discourses such as the modern audience is accustomed to hear and to applaud. They probably would not receive large space in an American Monday morning newspaper. They cannot be easily comprehended, because they are so different in form and content from any sermons that have ever been published in this or any other age. They must be read and pondered, reread and pondered again, until the truth in them becomes spirit and life in the reader.

The aim of the sermons is to give God’s answer to man’s primary needs—his deep, inward, spiritual needs—which must be satisfied before any other needs can be satisfied. The sermons, therefore, do not soothe or please or flatter the reader. He may lay them aside without reading them to the end, because he is made to feel, as never before, his worthlessness and helplessness—the worthlessness even of the best that he thinks and does. Not only the sinner but the righteous man is brought to judgment and must cry for mercy. Therefore the reader may say to himself: “Can I do nothing that is acceptable to God? Nothing that is worthwhile? Does not this lead to hopeless despair? Am I not robbed of all power of moral endeavor?”

That is precisely the effect that the preachers intend to produce in the reader, or the hearer. For man must be overcome, humbled to the dust, before God can lay hold of him, lift him up, mold him to and for His eternal purpose. Only when man is brought into the condition of the publican facing the blaze of the holiness and righteousness of God, or of the prodigal who in coming to himself comes to his father, is he in a condition to become a child of God, to cry Abba Father, to enter upon the work of God, to be co-worker with God in His Kingdom. One who has already prepared his program and wants God to ratify it, who has already found God and defined Him, who is bent on building the Kingdom of God into the hearts of men with modern techniques and the wisdom of science, will find little in these sermons to please him, unless by the grace of God the truth of the sermons will change his mind. Man’s response to the gospel is the response of repentance and of faith working in love through the patience of hope. This is the beginning of life, of the abundant, the eternal life.

Yes, here hope is inspired such as one finds nowhere else excepting in God as revealed in the Scriptures; for here an infinite vista is opened before the soul through the prophets and the evangelists, a vista that ends in eternity. Yes, here is power, the power of omnipotent love given to man through Christ crucified, risen, glorified. Yes, here is optimism, the optimism that is based upon the abounding grace of God in Jesus Christ, from which will come the new heavens and the new earth in which dwelleth righteousness.

Again, the reader may be disappointed because he does not find on these pages wise sayings or ingenious pronouncements on the things that now disturb and interest men, discussions of the problems of life from the standpoint of common experience and in the light of the highest moral and social values. One looks in vain for sociological or political harangues, for literary masterpieces captivating the cultured reader with their fascinating rhetoric, for subtle theological speculations or philosophical acumen based on recent scientific discoveries, for satisfactory explanations of the contradiction between science and religion.

These sermons simply proclaim God, but not as a static absolute far removed from the world, not as an immanent essence entangled with the world; they preach the good news of God “in action,” of a living person who is wholly other than the world and yet Creator, Upholder of the universe, Savior and Sanctifier of men, as He is revealed in the prophets, incarnated in the Christ, working through His spirit in the fellowship of believers, the Church. They proclaim the purpose that has been in God through eternity and is now made manifest in Christ, that in the end His will of justice and love is to prevail as in heaven so upon earth. This and this alone is assumed to be the power of God unto salvation unto all them that believe.

Perhaps in sermons like these we may catch a glimpse of what Spengler was groping after and could not find, when he wrote:

“In this very century, I prophesy, the century of scientific-critical Alexandrianism, of the great harvests, of the final formulations, a new element of inwardness will arise to overthrow the will-to-victory of science. Exact science must presently fall upon its own keen sword. First, in the 18th Century, its methods were tried out, then, in the 19th, its powers, and now its historical role is critically reviewed. But from Skepsis there is a path to ‘second religiousness,’ which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect.”1

October, 1933,

Lancaster, Pa.