The Name of Jesus

Barth insists that the center of the New Testament is Jesus, and that without Him there is nothing to be said. The list found in 1 Corinthians 1:30 – wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption – “become a meaningless statement in spite of the high content of its predicates” without Jesus. For the writers of the New Testament, “wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption are not relevant concepts in themselves, but only as predicates of the subject Jesus.”

He concedes that “more recent historical research might permit itself the assertion that apart from the name Jesus Christ almost everything in the New Testament, everything that could at a pitch be worked up into a principle, has its more or less exact parallel outside the Bible, and so certainly cannot be the very essence of the matter.” But the name of Jesus makes all the difference, not only setting the New Testament off from everything else but raising everything to a “central and fundamental and eternal” level “the moment it is interpreted as the predicate an an utterance about Jesus Christ.” Jesus is not a single element among others, but “the mathematical point toward which all the elements of the New Testament witness are directed.”