Friday Florilegium

Karl Barth continues to dominate my theological world right now.  Here’s a quote from The Christian Life, 234, broken into bite-size bits and with emphasis added. As with anything in this style of language, I recommend slowly reading it aloud:

[God] would not be God if the unrighteousness and disorder that man has brought on his individual and social existence, the lordship of the lordless powers, and the suffering that man causes himself and has to endure under their lordship, did not find a limit in Him.

That [the lordless powers] have this limit may be seen already in their own sphere in the simple fact that the Christian and the Christian community prays “Thy Kingdom come.”

The fact that along with everything else that happens it also happens that people can and will, and, in all their weakness and confusion, do pray this proves the majesty and might of another kingdom, which is God’s Kingdom, is very different from the kingdom of disorder, the lordship of the lordless powers, to which the Christian and also the church are painfully enough exposed and even subject.

Within the sphere of these powers, that other Kingdom is obviously, if inconceivably, confessed and known. There is an open looking in its direction. A calling for it is heard, and invocation of God as its Lord and King.

Among all other human acts, and in all humanity, the act of this invocation is to be noted too, and in it may be the limit which is set for the kingdom of human disorder–set by the other Kingdom which, in the form of the prayer for its coming, is not only distant, but also near and already present.