Here are some highlights from Barth’s discussion on Christology in Church Dogmatics 1:2. These don’t convey the full gravitas of his discourse. It’s always a matter of caution when quoting others to be careful not to remove their words from their context. This is because by sharing parts outside their overall home, potentially weakens some of the overall emphasis, passion and rational clarity with which an author writes.

Hopefully this doesn’t do that.

‘…though Jesus Christ became a curse for us. Jesus Christ was not a sinful man…it is at this point that the Biblical doctrine of the incarnation of the Word, and the familiar parallels in the history of religions part company. There are also incarnations of Isis and Osiris; there is an incarnation in Buddha and Zoroaster. BUT it is only the New Testament that says “he hath made him to be sin” and “he became a curse for us”. Only here do we have so strict a concept of Emmanuel, of revelation and reconciliation’[i]

‘Sin is condemned by not being committed, by being omitted, by full obedience now being found in the very place where otherwise sin necessarily and irresistibly takes place. The meaning of the incarnation is: that now in the flesh – that is not done which all flesh does…if we ask where the sinlessness, or (positively) the obedience of Christ, is to be seen, it is not enough to look for it in this man’s excellences of character, virtues or good works.

For we can only repeat that the New Testament certainly did not present Jesus Christ as the moral ideal, and if we apply the canons usually applied to the construction of a moral ideal, we may easily fall into certain difficulties of solution, whether with the Jesus of the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark & Luke) or with the Jesus of John’s gospel.

Jesus Christ’s obedience consists in the fact that He willed to be and was only this one thing with all its consequences, God in the flesh, the divine bearer of the burden which man and woman, as a sinners must bear.’[ii]