"Powers of Folly": An Early Barth Sermon on the Principalities


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The Deserter by Boardman Robinson (1916).
(PD-1923, via Wikimedia Commons)
Reading some of the sermons Barth delivered in Safenwil, Switzerland, in 1914 yields a few tantalizing surprises. I found some of these in his homily from October 18, an almost uncanny meditation on the principalities and powers.

A Unique Time of God: Karl Barth’s WWI Sermons, Trans. & Ed. B y William Klempa (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2016).

 Barth's sermon text was Romans 8:38-39, the culmination of one of the most profound and perhaps one of the most perplexing passages in the New Testament. Having pondered the groans of a creation eagerly awaiting liberation from the bondage of death, Paul writes:
I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Read more at http://derevth.blogspot.com/2017/06/powers-of-folly-early-barth-sermon-on.html

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