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There are novels which once read become part of the way you think and look at the world. The story draws you in, you become identified with the characters and plot, you slowly invest yourself in the narrative flow and in the outcome and resolution of the plot. Chaim Potok's The Chosen is one such novel in my own life. I read it in 1974, on my way to University on University Avenue in Glasgow. I was in the upstairs deck of a double decker bus, it was dreich and wet and nearly dark, and I was lost in that first chapter about the baseball game and how an enmity turned into a friendship between two boys from very different Jewish traditions, living in Brooklyn in the 1940's.

I've re-read The Chosen several times since, and saw the movie which had Rod Steiger as the Rebbe and a cameo by Potok as a Talmud Professor. If you've never read it, do yourself a favour and do so, and the sequel The Promise which continues the story of the two friends, Danny Saunders and Reuven Malters.

Here are a number of reasons why I think this is a wonderful novel, and transformative of the way we look at the world

This is the story of a friendship. Two 15 year old students become friends after they have a serious confrontation in a baseball game, injected with religious hostility between two different ways of being Jewish. Reuven's father is a professor of Jewish studies, expert in historical criticism, liberal in his methods and conclusions, but nonetheless devoted to Talmud and Torah as the foundation of his people's identity. Danny's father is the Rebbe of a local Hasidic sect, a powerful and charismatic religious leader of conservative and even reactionary views about Talmud, and the Messiah the hope of Israel. Through the two friends, these two cultures clash, and the friendship is threatened by the collision of two worlds.

Throughout the story Talmud, the text, has the significance of a pervasive character, which takes on a life of its own in the studies, discussions and collision of ideas as Jewish faith either accommodates to or confronts the modern world. The historical critical methods call in question the fixed integrity of the text and look for meaning through scientific research and text critical methods. The vast traditional oral and written commentaries provide the given options for the conservative Talmudists of the Hasidic community. The confrontation of these approaches to Talmudic text at several places is a revelation of the piety, passion and devotion of both traditions to the text, and these are embodied in the two friends, and their fathers. 

A major theme of the novel is silence. The use of silence as a formative imposition on Danny by his father the Rebbe, the enforced silence between the friends by the Rebbe's reaction to the foundation of the State of Israel, but also the times of silence for healing, grieving, listening both to the world and to others. In libraries the two friends find a place to meet and talk and think; not so much silence as a congenial place for listening, another major theme woven throughout the story.

The novel begins with an eye injury, and then time in a hospital ward where others have eye problems. All the main characters have spectacles, and different eye problems, whether from lack of sleep, tension headaches, overwork in studying and writing, and these background references are subtly suggestive in the accounts of reading and studying Talmud, Danny's feverish study of Freud, and also in the background a refrain from the start of the book by an eye-injured boxer that the world is cock-eyed.

These and other elements of Potok's novel are interlaced with the main theme of friendship and its tensions, and the place of religion in the modern world. That the friendship survives and indeed flourishes points to the possibility of religious accommodation, mutual respect and an alternative to the need to negate the other in order to secure one's own identity.

I'm reading a number of Potok's novels again. And being made aware of the significant nudges still felt in the reading. The Palestine and Israeli conflict and the exclusion of Torah from the political and civil legislation of Israel; the dangers of both fundamentalism and of scientific criticism when they claim a monopoly of authority, methodology and interpretive validity; the importance of the sacred text in a religious tradition, and its capacity to be a power for enlightenment or ignorance, or its capacity to bring together or divide. This is a novel written in 1966 – 50 years later it still has prophetic echoes.

Reading a review of Landmarks, by Robert Macfalane, by the excellent essayist Alan Jacobs, I came across a lexical controversy I had forgotten. Jacobs who is an expert in words and reading, brought it back to mind. By the way when I say an "expert in words and reading" I am not being merely rhetorical or spouting ill-considered exaggeration, as if the same could not be said of every good writer. Alan Jacobs has written important work on A Theology of Reading, and The Distracted Reader, as well as numerous volumes of essays known for their literary range, psychological astuteness, theological and philosophical awareness and, as important as each of these, their ability to educate both intellect and heart.

Here is an extract from the review:

"Near the outset of Landmarks, Macfarlane describes a controversy that emerged only at the beginning of 2015, though it centered on something that happened in 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary appeared:

A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.

A representative of the press explained the ratonale for this decision: " 'When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance … that was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed." A number of writers, including Macfarlane, protested this change, and one of them, the poet Andrew Motion, commented with some heat: "Their defence—that lots of children have no experience of the countryside—is ridiculous. Dictionaries exist to extend our knowledge, as much (or more) as they do to confirm what we already know or half-know."

Jacobs goes on to point out that the important issue at stake isn't the retention of the words in the dictionary, but the loss of knowledge, experience and awareness that underlies the redundancy and then excision of words from the language of ordinary experience. My reasons for thinking more about this go deeper still. The learning of language, and the associated tasks of education, interpretation, writing and communication, are each dependent on the availability and currency of words. If words are removed from use then the world is reconfigured around their absence, and shaped into the future by the presence, and often the aggressive presence, of new words, many of them related, as indicated in the quote above, to technology and IT.

It is the work of people like Robert MacFarlane, Roger Deakin, Nan Shepherd, three of the best British nature writers of the past century, to chronicle the surrounding natural world, to conserve the richness of language and naming, to describe what others may not have the opportunity or inclination to see, and thus to keep our semantic currency rich in traditions local and parochial, and therefore capable of maintaining the richly woven fabric of description and meaning that such humane writing preserves. The idea that we could ever think, let alone make lexical and publishing policy of key reference texts, on the assumption that a child does not need a description of an acorn because they may never see one or come across the word, is one that should alert a culture awash with technologisms to the dehumanising effects of language culling.

Yes, I do. I mark my own books, with a system I've used since University and College days. Always in pencil, and books I know I will want to revisit, consult, read again, and books I want to review, precis and take notes from. There is a discipline close to an art form to marking up a text that has been studied, read closely and deeply, listened to and heard. Personal notes in a personally owned book are like footprints left on the journey, or guideposts left as aids for the next time we pass on this particular path.

And that's the thing. Personal notes in a personally owned book. The first two photos on this post are of books in the University Library in Aberdeen. Disfigured, vandalised, rendered all but unreadable by anyone coming after the perpetrated horrors of ink, highlights and addiction to underlining. The readers who did this, students or staff, have stolen the property of the library as surely as if they had shoved the books up their jumpers and sauntered out into the sunshine carrying, irony multiplied, books about the providence of God! Paul Helm's lucid survey of this difficult yet comforting doctrine about the God who sees and foresees, is an unreadable mess of ink from pens leaned on so hard that the pages are indented on the back as well as defaced on the print side. The use of liquid ink makes it even worse as the ink bleeds through to obscure the print behind.

It's an interesting, and surprisingly depressing exercise to ask what goes on in the mind of a person who takes a book from the shelves which is the property of all students, and feels free to lay it waste as an aid to their education. Education, that process that seeks to make us more informed, wise, responsible, civil, equipped for life in society, open to new ideas and willing to question our old ones. How do you educate people to not destroy the means of education? Or how can you alert potential readers to the privilege, gift, responsibility and opportunity that is a library, and that all that richness and possibility depends on the integrity and stewardship of the hundreds of thousands of volumes held in trust for the purposes of humane learning? And that's the other word, trust. These photos are accurate diagrams of broken trust; they are blueprints of a selfishness that unless converted or checked, will carry on into the world after graduation, as an assumed entitlement to take rather than give, possess rather than share, lay waste whatever can be consumed and steal whatever they want enough to have, but don't want enough to pay for.

Now this picture is different. These are two dilapidated, almost disbound books sitting a couple of feet from each other on the shelves. They are surprisingly unmarked by readers, of whom there have been hundreds. Bultmann on John's Gospel and Carson on John's Gospel. Goodness! For those not familiar with New Testament Studies, the approach of these two scholars could not be more different – almost all they have in common is the title, and it is a given! The issue slips inside have been replaced countless times; they have been consulted, read, studied, plundered, referred to, for years. They should really be sent to be rebound, and no doubt some time they will. But there is a noble shabbiness in such well used books, and honourable dilapidation of burst spines, bumped corners and frayed hinges.

If there was a library sale tomorrow, I'd buy these. They are witnesses to the discipline of study and the durability of classic works. Because different as they are, Bultmann on John is a classic of 20th Century exegesis, famously described as a volume in which Bultmann asked all the right questions and gave mostly the wrong answers. And Carson represents a tradition of conservative scholarship, alongside Leon Morris, which takes the historicity and theological integrity of John with great seriousness. I am a bibliophile, and few sights are more satisfying than books which have enriched generations of students, and have the wear and tear to prove it. There are many books on those shelves, some as old as these, which have hardly been disturbed since acquisition – that doesn't make them worthless or useless. But these books, and others like them, they carry the fingerprints of many readers, the bindings are shaken and split, but their worn shabbiness has its own poignant beauty.

At the Community Cafe talking with a group who came in for the scones – as you do – they are very fine scones. And they aren't the size, or the weight, of curling stones. One of those friends had retired from Wimpey Houses, where he had been as he phrased it, just a humble joiner. Which was his hook line to say, "Like Jesus."

Those who know me will be aware I have conducted a long term campaign, gentle but persistent, against the adverbial use of "just". Yes I know, it is overused and bankrupt and redundant when used in prayers as a semantic breathing space to keep the words flowing as if God might interrupt in any space we leave. But I am also referring to that use of the word which is self-diminishing or other-diminishing. "I am just a whatever" is a form of self-deprecation that can become a habit, and is based on making comparisons between what we are and what we, or others, expect us or wish us to be.

Now in fairness my new joiner friend wasn't the least bit bothered by his use of the word; in fact he was perfectly content with being a joiner, indeed a ship's carpenter which is the Premier League of joiners. But the conversation set me off thinking about the consequences on our view of ourselves, or of another person, when that word "just" is used in the description. The long slow drip, drip, drip of reductionism, the danger of habit growing into mindset, as I compare who I am with who others are, their status and mine, their gifts and mine, their worth and mine. I guess none of us set out to think that way; and indeed many of us don't consciously think that way, though we often do unconsciously. And yet.

It's that niggling "and yet" that has turned me into someone who can occasionally sound rude when I correct mid-conversation by gently asking the word "just" to be dropped, along with its downward pulling ballast. And I do that as a Christian, and for reasons of Christian pastoral understanding. Paul's great charter of liberty, implies as much. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." No room for a diminishing "just" in that description of the new community that is the body of Christ; no patience with any suggestion someone is just a Greek not a Jew, just a slave not free, just a woman not a man.

Then there's that long narrative metaphor of the body in Corinthians, where Paul has fun imagining all kinds of distortions and incongruities when any part of the body becomes self-important at the expense of the other parts. The whole passage is about the relative worth of each part of the body to the rest. None is all important and none is disposable; each is required and all are needed; any assumed hierarchy of importance that looks down on other parts as "just" a toe, ear, appendix or whatever is, well, just wrong!

To those of Pharisaic mind, those who think otherwise are just sinners; a woman with an alabaster flask saying thank you with attention grabbing extravagance is just an embarrassment; a man mad with grief or fear or rage or these and many other destructive and addictive urges is just mad Legion; and that woman in bed with the wrong man was just an adulteress. And the scandal of each of these stories is that nowhere in their telling, can the word "just" ever be heard on the lips of Jesus.

So as a follower of Jesus, part of my continuing education is to identify the word "just" in my own speaking, or in my inner attitude to others, and correct it. And yes, as a trait of pastoral attentiveness to others, to hear and even more gently correct the stated or implied "just" in the telling of their story. In nearly all cases the diminishing adverb "just" devalues, betrays comparisons of worth and status, and generally damns with faint praise. The Gospel on the other hand is the good news that in Christ all such comparisons are redundant, and personal worth indexed to a love both cruciform and transforming.

While on holiday in Whitby we visited the famous St mary's Church which sits beside the ruined abbey, on the exposed headland. This is a fascinating building, with box pews, the best positioned and best appointed were family owned, and a church maid was paid to keep them clean and free from soot and dust from one sunday to the next.

The architectural furnishings reinforced those social divisions, and remain monuments to social arrangements with which the church has too long colluded. Those boxed pews were so high it is unlikely anyone of smaller stature would see much beyond them, and so enclosed that it was possible to be in the house of God in your own wee room, not inconvenienced by the visible presence of other human beings. The high pulpit meant the preacher could at least see the heads of the congregation, but how there could ever be a meeting of hearts, or anything like human communication across the chasms of social convention, architectural exclusion zones, and rhetorical remoteness is hard to imagine. The one positive surprise was the notice on the pulpit about the hearing tubes and the Rector's wife. The idea of the Rector's wife having her personal loop system 200 years ago is an early recognition of inclusion, an ironic gesture before its time, of building modification to accommodate those with disabilities, albeit a privileged member of the congregation.

Now, with the rapid decline of Christian influence in society the church, established or not, is having to come to terms with a different social context which will require a different configuration of Chrstian community, and a radical change in how Christians understand mission, the gospel and the world in which that mission and that gospel are to be embodied, proclaimed and made present. Sitting in that old church, established, respectable, visited by tourists out of curiosity, viewed as a museum of a faith threatened with extinction in the polls and comments of our data fascinated culture, and already with the smell and feel of a long history of disengagement, I felt both poignancy and the slip towards acceptance, resignation and inner adjustment to anticipated loss.

But just as quickly I felt the no of the Holy Spirit, that inner defiance of observed realities that we call faith, trust in a deeper and more enduring reality which is the life and gift and activity of God. The work of the Holy Spirit in guiding, enabling and driving the mission of the church, convicting the world of sin and its own brokenness, as creator and guardian of creation in a world trashed and rubbished by our consumerist obsessions, and as the transforming gift of God in Christ calling and creating community in the Kingdom of God – that work of God is to be prayed for, and our lives to be given to God, that he may bring to completion the work he has started in those leaven-communities of believers, called to be salt and sent to be light.

I am a Wesleyan kind of Baptist. Ever since as a never been in church before teenager I heard a congregation singing O for a Thousand Tongues to sing my great redeemer's praise, descant and all, I have loved and inhabited Wesleyan spirituality. "And Can it Be" is a hymn of distilled evangelicalism, theologically daring (emptied Himself of all but love…"), ringing with awe struck gratitude (my chains fell off, my heart was free..), confessionally alert to sin (Died he fore me, who caused his pain…) and scintillating with mystery and adoring wonder (in vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of love divine.).

I've studied Wesleyan hymnology for over 30 years, and I still sing some of those hymns as if for the first time their poetry and theology and exuberance and heartfelt authenticity was one urgent invitation to enter the holy place where God in Christ meets the wondering soul. Likewise I've read and reflected long on the work and lives of John and Charles Wesley, tried to get inside not only their theology but the experiences out of which it was forged, and the traditions that supply the energy sources and raw materials for such masterpieces of Christian theology in which words and worship deal with hearts both broken and healed at that place the Wesleys preached and prayed and sang about – the throne of grace. That word grace, was for both the Wesley's nearly but not quite synonymous with love. Yes grace is love, but a particular kind of love, acted and enacted in creation as the self-articulation of that eternal exchange of love within the life of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

I am therefore deeply and repeatedly saddened that the originating sources of Methodism seem to have been silted up and no longer flow so freely in the channels of chapels and worshipping communities, and no longer overflow in the same ways into the communities of villages, towns and cities. Of course not only Mathodism; Baptist, Congregationalist, and other free church traditions are having to reflect with serious intent on their past, and on their uncertain future. So when I come across a small Wesleyan Chapel, it becomes a place of pilgrimage, when standing inside touching the pews, or touching the stone outside, I try to imagine the people whose special place this is, and whose worship and weekly faithfulness gave soul and life to the furniture, the stones, and the people, those living stones being built into a temple fit for God.

The chapel pictured above is in Littlebeck, a few miles out of Whitby. Most of the services are now taken by the small continuing congregation. The back hall is now the home of a Men's Shed, where several men work away at the stuff that is important – conversation, friendship, making and repairing, trying through the gifts of time, words, energy and care, to create a safe place for the lonely, a welcoming place for the stranger, and a local place where friendship can be presupposed.

In one sense this isn't what Wesley had in mind when he organised local Methodists into societies. But in an age of church decline, of ageing demographics across the denominations, and changing habits of social life, it may be that such small gatherings will be leaven, salt, light. And if they don't ignite the spiritual exuberance of a previous age, perhaps they will nevertheless provide a place where that same love of God is embodied, shared and lived, in the quiet faithfulness that is friendship, and in the enduring disciplines of a faith which began in the life of a carpenter.     

Nothing in life is ever simple! Actually I don't believe that – the laughter of friends is simple; the pancakes, maple syrup and pineapple I've just scoffed was a simple dessert; the needs of our cat, Smudge are simple – food, cuddles, warmth, and the door opened to let her in/out/in/out ad nauseam; ordering yet another book online is far too simple – one click ordering is subversive of all budgets…if your clicking finger offends you, cut it off…..might just about be a contemporary warning; and yes, the Gospel is simple….eh, well, haud oan a meenit, Jim!

When I say the Gospel is simple I don't mean doesn't need any thought; I don't mean come to Jesus and get all your problems solved, simple; I don't mean following Jesus faithfully today is as simple as saying the sinner's prayer; and I don't mean the Gospel of God's baffling, extravagant, welcoming, forgiving, transforming, heart breaking and heart-mending love can be reduced to a praise song, pure and simple.

But I do mean that reduced to the bare essentials God's love is most clearly recognised in Jesus Christ; I do mean that no one needs a portfolio of achievements, a cluster of transferable skills, or any of the other image building paraphernalia that fills the usual impressive curriculum vitae, to get an interview with God; and yes, pastor and theological educator that I am, I do mean that to know the love of God in Christ that surpasses knowledge is the most important educational goal of our lives, and quite simply, the only qualification that ultimately matters. At which point the Gospel is no longer simply simple – it is simply incomprehensible.

The wonderfully eccentric people called the Shakers, who were also concentric when it comes to community and God, have a beautiful little song, 'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free….' These remarkable people, believed everything in life is simply gift. Their furniture is made with loving craft, simple design, and a view to the beauty of usefulness. It expresses the meaning of home, togetherness, the dance of life shared with God. The last communities are now dying out, but their commitment to simple life, community love and worship as the community choreographed in dance and co-ordinated in love, remains deeply, subversively and simply, prophetic. Every now and again I need to hear their quiet defiant advice, 'Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free….'

A while ago I copied out some words from a Journal article – and I didn't keep the reference for it – but now and again, reading it I'm reminded of how in my life ( and, I suspect, in yours) things take on an 'inordinate complexity'.  Then to 'flee to the Beloved, is to know ourselves loved, is to learn again the simple truth, the Gospel truth – God is love.

When in doubt and confusion,

call in the scholars

and they will fill your minds

with such inordinate complexity

that you flee to the Beloved

and take refuge in Simplicity

as the only solution.

The idea for this tapestry came from I’m not sure where. But I do remember imagining a chalice touched with the fire of the Holy Spirit, and wondering what that might look like. From there I worked at the shape and colour of the chalice and decided it should be large, generous, dominating the scene, worked in small half cross stitch, but qualified and enriched by other images, particularly fire and another appropriate symbol of the Spirt. I considered olives for their oil, used in anointing, and one of the biblical emblems of the Spirit. The dove, however, was obvious, and its connection with Jesus’ baptism, and with the creation story, confirmed its place above the chalice.

I also considered grapes, signifying the wine of the Eucharist but decided to make the wine dominant within the chalice, and close to a small portrayal of the cross. Thus the coming of the spirit in flames, the wine of the new covenant, the cross as the place of reconciliation, and all this set in a field of wheat with flowers, signifying both the bread of the Eucharist and the beauty of creation.

The flames were worked entirely at random with the colours chosen as I went along. The colours were deliberately strong and much more diverse than red and yellow flames. There seemed no reason that the flames at Pentecost should be limited to human perceptions, so the colours express the diversity of creation, the multiplicity of the work of the Spirit and the infinite possibilities of the creative, purposive and redemptive work of God.

The dove is white, a deliberate attempt at both emphasis and differentiation. The contrast between the wild power of the top half, and the much more ordered fruitfulness of the harvest field in the bottom half is an intended effect, though it was not what I first intended. It was trying to solve the problem of bread and wine that pushed me towards wheat and then my early years in the country and corn fields spangled with flowers suggested small, bright and understated beauty in the midst of the Eucharistic grain.

The borders have become virtually a signature element in my tapestries. The allusion to the rainbow does not follow the colour spectrum but makes visible diversity and harmony, difference and complementarity. The inner gold is both light and the life sustaining fruit of sunlight, grain, and bread; the single red line around the border is evocative of the wine of the Eucharist, and the redeeming love that surrounds the whole of Creation.  

The entire work is an experiment in theology, a prolonged meditation on two theological realities which give definition and imagination to Christian living – the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist. I am expecting that this tapestry will mean more to me than to most others who might look at it – not only because I did it and therefore have much already invested in it; but because I am genuinely curious about the relationship between what we do at Holy Communion, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit who in Johannine theology, takes of the things of Christ and makes them known to us. 

Much of my discretionary time nowadays is spent doing the stuff I enjoy, but in busier years had to ration or even put off till work commitments reduced.  So I am now often and happily to be found reading big books, or at least using and studying chunks thereof. Not always theology or biblical studies, but I do have a known weakness for biblical criticism, exegetical commentaries and much else that opens up the biblical world so that we can begin to make connections between ancient text and life as we have to live it today.

So this afternoon I spent time reading in a commentary – and in the garden with the sun so hot it felt like I was maybe even in Macedonia, where Paul around AD 50 founded a few small communities of Christian believers. F F Bruce's Commentary on Thessalonians is packed with lucid commonsense and careful historical judgement, and while 30 years old, still holds its own alongside more recent commentaries. I have and am using half a dozen commentaries on Thessalonians, each of them different, and sure, with some overlap. But there is a tone of voice, a demeanor and intellectual disposition in F F Bruce that those of us who have read him for decades recognise and appreciate for what its is, using the old phrase "believing criticism".

One example – all the commentators dig around the historical context, social background, varying accounts of life in a Greco-Roman city, and try to make sense of the text of Paul's letters, building on all this information, historical reconstruction, and at times historical surmise. But in a very fine paragraph F F Bruce allows that careful historical attention to detail to illuminate the mind and inner reaction of Paul to the ups and downs of those few days in Thessalonica. Having won converts, he was set up and chased out of town as an enemy of Caesar, a subversive presence. The Thessalonian letters were written months later because Paul was prvented from coming back – here is Bruce's paragraph about that:

He had been virtually expelled as a troublemaker from one Macedonian city after another…In each Macedonian city they visited they had established a community of believers. But the missionaries had been  forced to leave these young converts abruptly, quite inadequately equipped with the instruction and encouragement they would need to enable them to stand firm in the face of determined opposition. Would their immature faith prove equal to the challenge? It did, outstandingly so, but this could not have been foreseen. The first gospel campaign in Macedonia in the light of the sequel, can be recognised as an illustrious success, but at the time when Paul was compelled to leave the province it must have been felt as a heartbreaking failure.

And there it is. Bruce the exegete of the text, with the same restrained thoughtfulness, exegetes the emotion and motivation of Paul the missionary. That is the kind of paragraph out of which sermons are legitimately born. Thus. At the times of apparent failure and rejection in living and sharing the gospel of Jesus, other things are happening that won't be evident till later, further down the road. And no, it doesn't always turn out that way – sometimes it goes on feeling we wasted our time, or nothing happened. But often it does, and what is needed by us is not results based obedience, as if numbers and visible success was our right; no what is needed is trust based obedience, and a hopefulness in God and in the work God does when we are not around!

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.