Barth: obedience and unity

Saturday, May 30, 2020
    Feast of Josephine Butler, Social Reformer, 1906
    Commemoration of Joan of Arc, Visionary, 1431
    Commemoration of Apolo Kivebulaya, Priest, Evangelist, 1933
Meditation:
    If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing right. But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers.
    —James 2:8-9 (NIV)
Quotation:
    In the surrender of separation only one thing must be abandoned, namely, a failure in obedience to Christ, hitherto unrealised, in which a Church, in common... with a neighbor Church, or with all the severed Churches, has had a share of guilt in that trouble which is the multiplicity of the Churches. Its share has possibly lain in the fact that the normal and necessary multiplicity of communities, gifts, and persons within the Church has by the agency of the evil one been perverted; possibly in this, that undue place and import have been attributed to what is racial, to elements of human mentality and ethic, or of historical persistence. This would be the disobedience which the Church would have to consider, as it listened afresh to the voice of Christ.
    ... Karl Barth (1886-1968), The Church and the Churches [1936], Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005, p. 43-44 (see the book)
    See also Jas. 2:8-9; Acts 20:28; 1 Cor. 1:13; 11:18; Eph. 2:19-20; Jas. 2:3-4
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, have mercy on us, for we forget that we are servants. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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