Interestingly Barth is deeply suspicious and critical of a homiletic that primarily seeks relevance, and a foothold in culture. His own homiletic is a call to an adamantine faithfulness to the Word of God as prophetic witness, and to fearless proclamation of the truth of God in Christ. It is in this context that CD1/1 on The Word of God was written.
Think Hitler's manoeuvring into the Chancellorship, the burning of the Reichstag, Kristalnacht, the rise of Himmler and Goering, the SS and the Gestapo, the opening of Dachau and the night of the long knives – all these in 1933. Barth's response was to train people to preach into and above that growing cacophony of power lust, populist malleability and toxic hatreds. Such was the perilous and astonishing context for that first volume of Barth's Church Dogmatics. His achievement strengthens further my appreciation for Barth's prescience and his own sense of God's call to write and speak of the Word of God with theological urgency.
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