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conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Pauline, G&ouml;ttingen, Bible with the genre: Christian Books & Bibles, Bible Study & Reference?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Epistle to the Ephesians'
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conversations.value: the first four paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Epistle to the Ephesians
  In the Ephesians lectures, this hermeneutic of textual self-effacement has receded. The free theological meditations of the commentary are still present in the lectures, but they are accompanied by a quite different interpretative practice, absent from the commentary: in a word, by exegesis. The difference is signaled not only by the use of the Greek text but also by the fact that it is frequently cited within Barth's comments on particular words or phrases. The movement is no longer away from the text but around it. Barth's Ephesians is not transparent; it bears witness, but it does not make itself invisible any more than Matthias Grünewald's John the Baptist does as he gestures toward the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world—a figure in whom Barth already sees an icon of the biblical witness.
  Modern editors of the Greek New Testament face the same problem as translators. The ancient manuscripts on which they rely generally lack punctuation and even spaces between words. In the great fourth-century uncial Codex Sinaiticus, to which Barth refers briefly in his second lecture, the relevant passage is formatted as follows:
  In presenting the Greek New Testament to modern readers, editors make use of supplementary aids to comprehension such as lowercase letters, word division, punctuation, and verse enumeration. The present exegetical issue hangs on where the editor places the comma. In Eberhard Nestle's popular Novum Testamentum Graece, used by Barth, the first two editions punctuate the key words as follows:
  In the third edition, however, dating from 1901, Nestle has changed his mind about how the passage is to be punctuated:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: This interpretation of the εὐλογητός seems unavoidable, given its relationship to the εὐλογήσας that is spoken by God and to everything else that is said in verses 4–14. The creature's eternal election, redemption, appointment to hope, and anointing by the Holy Spirit constitute the divine act that Paul refers to as εὐλογεῖν. Human εὐλογεῖν means the act by which the creature becomes objective before God and stands in the place where God draws near. Think about what this means! Clearly it is a profound ecstasy, more profound than any ecstasy that we can account for psychologically, an act in which a person radically transcends what is humanly possible. Could the creature be objective before God at one moment just as much as the next? Could the creature make the radically new beginning at any given moment? Couldn't the εὐλογεῖν at any moment signify the unprecedented transformation, the act that brings light out of darkness, a sublation of time? No, says Paul: the origin, spontaneity, and essence of the human εὐλογεῖν lie neither in the creature nor in creaturely time. Rather, God appears first with his εὐλογεῖν. Human εὐλογεῖν is a response to his call. His freedom is the sphere in which the creature acquires the freedom for such an act. This incomparable human possibility emerges from all possible human achievements just as radically as God himself emerges from the ranks of other gods. This explains the necessity for the human creature's praise of God and the vigor with which the creature is claimed for the glory of God. Praise, the divine possibility for man, which is beyond description and beyond all human boundaries, nevertheless becomes an actual reality for the creature. The divine possibility is a necessity. It manifests itself as an absolute act, tout court.
  Note that the divine act of blessing in which this human act is grounded is described as speech. God blesses. He speaks a word of promise and a word of grace. That is all. No gratia infusa. No direct communication of life. No direct relationship between God's will and what occurs in the world, within man, or among human affairs. Not a creative act but, as in Genesis, the creative word. He speaks, and it comes to be; he commands, and it stands firm [Ps. 33:9]. The word alone does it. In the word as word, every conceivable act is included. As divine word, God's εὐλογεῖν becomes the ground of and occasion for the human creature's εὐλογεῖν. If the divine possibility for man does not appear as word—with the utter strangeness and distinctiveness of the word, which cannot be understood directly—it does not appear at all. If is it not believed as word, it will not be believed at all. If it is not the possibility, which can only be believed, it is not the divine possibility for man. As God's possibility for the creature, it can only be believed. The New Testament λόγος is not simply the supreme form of humanly mediated reality or any kind of material hypostasis; rather, it refers to the relation in which God confronts man directly. Λογίζεσθαι and here εὐλογεῖν [denote] not to any kind of a priori relation but to the divinely created relation between God and man. Εὐλογεῖν therefore refers to the divine act as an undifferentiated, unexpected, free act of absolute revelation. As such, the divine word calls the human creature out of himself and into the world of the Father of Jesus Christ, into the world of freedom.
  The threefold use of the preposition ἐν points us in the same direction. Following Hofmann, I think it simplest and best to form three parallel sentences, each beginning with ἐν rather than forming three subordinate clauses. Unlike the majority of commentators, I see nothing in the text that requires a syntactical relationship between only the first two ἐν-clauses; and it seems to me that the meaning of the passage emerges most clearly if instead we separate each ἐν-clause with a comma and imagine all three as a circle, proceeding from the central εὐλογήσας. Before considering the nature of that blessing, we must describe the manner in which God blesses the creature. God blesses (1) with every blessing of the Spirit, (2) in heaven, (3) in Christ. If this gives the impression of saying the same thing three times, then we are on the right track: the blessing proceeds from the center of the same circle three times, albeit in three distinctive ways.
  Ἐν πάσῃ εὐλογίᾳ πνευματικῇ. The play on words with εὐλογεῖν appears once again. "God blesses us with blessings—and for this we are blessed!" Unless we assume that Paul wrote in a deliberately stylized fashion simply to sound poetic, then it should be obvious that the Pauline message is intentionally and thoroughly dialectical and must be understood dialectically. Do not be led astray by the current voices clamoring for simplicity, particularly by those who without any basis contrast the dialectical Paul with the allegedly simple Jesus. The goal of dialectical communication is simplicity, that is, the truth, that is, God. But God must be believed as God, and God can only be believed. Therefore, all authentic communication about him is necessarily dialectical, that is, broken, indirect, pointing beyond itself. We are not so simple that we can receive a simple communication about simplicity. Our alleged simplicity is ever-increasing complexity and confusion. We can be open to the divine simplicity only if we are profoundly unsettled in our human simplicity. Therefore, do not think that dialectic is a special feature of Paul that can be dismissed with the catchword "Paulinism." Dialectical theology is behind the best of Luther's early sermons and table talk. Most importantly, Jesus's speech is supremely dialectical. I would go so far as to say that Jesus's speech is even more dialectical than Paul's, precisely because his words, which at first sound so simple and direct, are actually so suggestive and laden with meaning. Whenever we speak about God, what is meant differs from what is said; and the more truly we speak about God, the greater is the difference between what we mean and what we say. And that is precisely why dialectical communication is so infinitely instructive and infinitely vexing for the interpreter. Whoever prefers to avoid it should know that he prefers not to hear about God. Whoever intends to hear about God, in whom we can only believe—whoever would hear afresh that God is the one in whom one can only believe—will certainly not avoid dialectical communication because he understands that it is the only adequate form of communication.
  To want more in this case is to want less. It is a heathen plerophory that promises more than the blessing of God, that promises the presence of God in the form of visible, direct immediacy, which is the domain of gods and idols. Here, where the point is how God has blessed us, let us take care not to hanker after what is not properly ours and thereby forfeit what we do have and are allowed to have. God blesses us with blessings. Any train that attempts to ignore this Halt! signal is derailed, as church history testifies a thousand times over. But, it is "with the blessings of the Spirit" that God blesses us. And with that, the unheard of is indeed declared: God's unmediated presence for us, for you and for me, God in his inapproachability, inaccessibility, and hiddenness. God, who cannot be known, surrounds, besieges, storms, and reorders the domain of my knowing. At the limits of my intellectual powers, of my strength of character and disposition, stands the power of God, who is both the final question and the final answer. My existence borders God's existence, verging not upon a separate existence but upon the inverse of my own nonbeing, the ultimate Aufhebung and grounding of my own existence. My personality is found as it is lost and lost as it is found in the ultimate reality of God's personality. God speaks. What does my speaking or my silence amount to? God acts. What is the source of my own action or nonaction? God is in the right. What difference does it make if I am in the right or not? God lives. What is the significance of my own life and death? Knowing this does not obliterate, neutralize, or obviate anything that is mine, positive or negative; but the relativity of all that is mine is clearly revealed, or to be precise, related to its origin, measured according to the standard by which all things are decided, large and small, life and death, good and evil. What I am, I am in relation to God.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last paragraph
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Holy 23–24, 43, 45, 81–83, 85, 87, 89–90, 92, 100–101, 107, 117–18, 121–25, 128–30, 143–45, 164n57, 170n154, 172n174