. . . Faith means trust. Trust is the act in which one may rely on the faithfulness of another, that His promise holds and that what He demands He demands of necessity. 'I believe means 'I trust. No more must I dream of trusting in myself, I no longer require to justify myself, to excuse myself, to attempt to save and preserve myself. This most profound of human efforts, to trust in ourselves, to see ourselves as right, has become pointless. I believe not in myself, but in God. . . So also trust in any sort of authorities, who might offer themselves to me as trustworthy, as an anchor which I should hold on to, has become frail and unnecessary. Trust in any sort of gods has become frail and unnecessary. . . no matter whether they have the form of ideas, or of any sort of destiny, no matter what they are called. Faith delivers us from trust in such gods, and therefore also from the fear of them, from the disillusionments which they inevitably, repeatedly hold for us. . . . To hold on to God is to rely on the reality that God is there for me, and to live in this certainty. This is the promise that God gives us: I am there for you. . . Because God is for us, we may also be for Him. Because He has given Himself to us, we may also in gratitude give Him the trifle which we have to give.
. . The glory of faith does not consist in our being challenged to do something, in having something laid on us which is beyond our strength. Faith is rather a freedom, a permission. It is permitted to be so - that the believer in God's Word [here Barth is referring to God's coming to us as Jesus, not as reading material / the Bible] may hold on to this Word in spite of everything that contradicts it. It is so; we never believe 'on account of', never 'because of'; we awake to faith in spite of everything. Think of the people in the Bible. They did not come to faith by reason of any kind of proofs, but one day they were so placed in situations that they might believe and then had to believe in spite of everything. God is hidden from us outside His Word, but shown to us in Jesus Christ. . . . When we believe, we must believe in spite of God's hiddenness. This hiddenness of God reminds us of our human limitation. We do not believe out of personal reason and power. Anyone who really believes knows that, The greatest hindrance to faith is again and again simply the pride and anxiety within our human hearts. We would rather not live by grace. Something within us energetically rebels against it. We do not wish to receive grace; at best we prefer to give ourselves grace, This swing between pride and anxiety is our human life, Faith bursts through them both.
- from Dogmatics in Outline
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