Dr. Karl Barth and Grace
“The great Protestant theologian of the last century, Karl Barth, also understood grace in the same way when it came to smacking [spanking] children. Barth taught the following:
“’Christian exhortation as such can never point in the direction of disciplinary severity.’ To raise children ‘in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, excludes provoking them to the anger, resistance, and rebellion that emerges through the ‘assertion of Law, or the execution of judgment.’ Admonitions in the book of Proverbs not to spare the rod of correction must be transformed by the duty to know and correspond in thought and deed to grace, and in that light to summon children to repentance. A mother’s and father’s training and advice are to be a ‘joyful invitation’ to their children to rejoice with them in Jesus Christ. ‘To be joyful,’ Barth explains, ‘is to expect that life will reveal itself as God’s gift of grace, that it will present and offer itself in provisional fulfilments of its meaning and intention as movement. To be joyful means to look out for opportunities for gratitude.’ The work of parents is limited by time and a receding social space in which other influences on children increasingly come into play. It is limited by the fact that parents cannot relieve their sons and daughters of personal responsibility. How much more vigorously must it be said that parents may nevertheless ‘give their children the opportunity to encounter the God who is present, operative and revealed in Jesus Christ, to know him and to learn to love and fear Him,’ and to that extent offer them a life that is joyful.”
“Additionally, let us seek after the Spirit of God because ‘if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law.’” Galatians 5:18
Quoted from Samuel Martin’s book, Thy Rod and Thy Staff They Comfort Me Christians and the Spanking Controversy, pg. 129, 130.
Mr. Martin’s source was William Werpehowski, essay “Reading Karl Barth on Children,” M. Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought, Eerdamns: Grand Rapids: Michigan, 2001, pgs. 399-400.
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