This is why I still read Karl Barth. He can be tediously wordy, annoyingly dogmatic, painstakingly thorough, unfairly selective, unabashed by fair criticism and relentlessly sure of his own rightness – at least as I read him. But he can also be theologically alight and therefore a soul-igniting voice; he penetrates into the darkness of human tragedy and the divine tragedy that is the story of redemption; he presupposes an epistemology which is both foundation and centre of all reality, Jesus Christ; and he insists against all other claims, that Christ is the first and last Word, the eternal Word, of Love in its Triune majesty revealed in the Word become flesh, proclaimed on the Cross, vindicated in resurrection.
So here he is near the end of his life, summing up his long life labour, still incomplete and never to be completed, The Church Dogmatics.
"'The last word which I have to say as a theologian and also as a politician is not a term like 'grace', but a name, 'Jesus Christ'. He is grace, and he is the last, beyond the world and the church and even theology …What I have been concerned to do in my long life has been increasingly to emphasize this name and to say: There is no salvation in any other name than this. For grace, too, is there. There, too, is the impulse to work, to struggle, and also the impulse towards fellowship, towards human solidarity. Everything that I have tested in my life, in weakness and in foolishness, is there. But it is there'."
— Eberhard Busch, *Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts*, 496.
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