The Infinitely Surprising Thing
I have recently completed reading Dogmatics in Outline, by Karl Barth. I found it to be both insightful and moving. Here is one such passage:
‘He who from eternity willed to become man for our good, has become man in time for our good, will be and remain man in eternity for our good’ - that is, Jesus Christ. The English novelist, Dorothy L. Sayers, who has recently turned to theology with remarkable interest, has described in a pamphlet how unheard-of , how strange, how ‘interesting’ the narrative is of the fact that God became man. Imagine for a moment this story being one day put in the papers! It really is a sensational story, more sensational than anything else. And that is the centre of Christianity, this infinitely surprising thing, that never existed before and cannot be repeated.
At all times there have been combinations of these two concepts, God and man. The idea of incarnation is not alien to mythology. But the thing that distinguishes the Christian message from this idea is that ll myths are basically just the exposition of an idea, of a general truth. A myth circles round the relation between day and night, winter and spring, death and life; it always implies a timeless reality. The message of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with this myth; it is formally distinguished from it by its possessing the unique historical conception that it is said of an historical human being that it happened in His existence that God was made man, that consequently His existence was identical with the existence of God. The Christian message is a historical message. And only by seeing eternity and time together, God and man, only then do we grasp what is expressed by the name Jesus Christ.