                           19981023.00

My copy of Barth's Roemerbrief bears on its titelpage
the following legend:

22.-23. Tausend; Neunter Abdruck der neuen Bearbeitung,
Evangelischer Verlag A.G. Zollikon-Zuerich 1954.

I don't know where that puts it in the sequence of revisions.
Assuming this is the version we want, I can easily, at the time,
photocopy any pages that we might want to look at together
and it would seem unnecessary for you to go to any trouble
to obtain a second copy.

You write:

A:
> To reduce faith to assent to, or belief in,
> a set of "objectively true" propositions
> is to rob it of any of the mystical immediacy
> that faith has in Paul.
>
B:
> To me, faith is a gift of the Spirit
> (cf. also 1 Cor 12:9)--faith is given to us.
>
C:
> On the other hand, to state it crudely,
> I believe faith is directed outward,
> toward external realities.
> In the New Testament there is faith in the Resurrection,
> which is a "real" event, I believe,
> not occurring merely in the minds of the disciples.

Am I wrong in discerning a contradiction between A: and C:?
Is not faith "directed outward" by that very token deprived
of its "mystical immediacy"?

And what about the Holy Spirit?
Are we, a la Hegel, to construe Spirit, holy or otherwise,
as "objective" reality?

Is God an object?
Is it possible to worship an objective deity
without lapsing into idolatry?

It seems to me that the contradiction, - or less pejoratively, -
the dialectic, between the objective and the non-objective
permeates not only those of Saint Paul's epistles that I have read,
but permeates in fact the theology of the entire New Testament
as I understand it.

If such a contradiction exists, is the denial of it an essential
or even a permissible element of becoming or being a Christian?
Is the denial of that contradiction what we mean by "faith"?

Ernst Meyer

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