Guest Writer Spotlight – Creation: The setting for a love story

Imagine the most beautiful love story your mind can create.

The story needs to have a universal truth, a struggle, mystery, and unconditional love that can survive even death, so the audience can reach their catharsis with the characters in the end, and the story can be remembered and retold.

The images on the stage, the mood lighting, the actor’s working together to tell the story of the play write and bring forth the director’s vision, mean nothing without the perfect setting to perform the play.

To create something so beautiful and not have it realized on the stage is heartbreaking for the one who created it. The theology of Karl Barth follows a similar format.

God the creator is the play write, the author of a beautiful love story between God and His son Jesus Christ. Their covenant is the story that needs to be shared. The plot is carried out by all of humanity through God’s grace, with the Holy Spirit as the director.

In order to share this covenant, God needed to create the world as the perfect stage to tell His story. We must remember that the story itself existed in the mind of the Creator before one word was written down or any action has taken place.

The Bible for Barth was the revelation of God’s word through God’s grace.

The only way for revelation to take place is for an event to occur to make it possible for God to reveal himself. We must encounter the word of God in order for the proclamation of the word to become the actual word of God.

The covenant is the goal of creation. The covenant between God and His Son is the love story to be shared.

God created man and placed them on the stage so His story could be put in motion. God wants to have beings that love in the same way that the Father and the Son love. We are to exist and mimic the love story between the father and the Son with one another.

As the Director, the Holy Spirit guides us in our deliberate actions of worship and commitment to God. It is our choice to be obedient or not.

Jesus is the eschatological realization of the will of God – the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.

The Bible is the mediator that helps us not only understand the word of God

but to experience the living word of God.

God encounters us through the movement and interactions of the Holy Spirit. It is this presence that adds a sense of mystery to the story.

As the story unfolds, more and more people are drawn to it. The audience waits in anticipation for its conclusion, while the Creator sits back and enjoys the performance.

Through the Holy Spirit, God is active in the story and encounters all of humanity. The covenant between God and His Son mirrors the covenant between God and His Creation. It is a beautiful love story that will be shared by all in its’ mysterious conclusion.

Karl Barth

Karl Barth (May 10, 1886 – December 10, 1968) studied theology from 1904-1909 and helped to lead the movement away from Liberal theology to his Crisis theology from the 1920’s through the 1950’s.

When he rediscovered the scriptures looking for a “wholly other’ starting point with which to base his theology on, he understood there to be a dialectic language throughout the bible. This was his no/yes dialectic that Barth points out in both the Old and New testaments.

Barth wanted to lead the teachings of theology

back to the prophetic teachings of the bible.

The bible for Barth is the revelation of God’s word through God’s grace. God did not need to have creation, but in His eternal freedom, he wanted to create. God wanted to share the love story of the inner relationship between the Father and the Son.

This was his no/yes dialectic that Barth points out in both the Old and New testaments.

Barth wanted to lead the teachings of theology back to the prophetic teachings of the bible. The bible for Barth is the revelation of God’s word through God’s grace. God did not need to have creation, but in His eternal freedom, he wanted to create. God wanted to share the love story of the inner relationship between the Father and the Son.

God did not need to have creation, but in His eternal freedom, he wanted to create. God wanted to share the love story of the inner relationship between the Father and the Son.

About the writer – Cynthia Teske has a Bachelor of fine arts degree from Chapman University and a Master of Arts degree in Theology from Fuller Theological seminary.