Luxury of Faith: Karl Barth and the Spirit's Gift of Healing

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The ‘luxury of faith’ Karl Barth and the Spirit’s Gift of Healing1 In The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Karl Barth explores two ways of understanding faith: saving faith, which he deals with in the concluding paragraph of Vol IV/1, and healing faith, which he briefly touches upon in the opening paragraph of Vol IV/2.2 While Barth develops these two portraits of faith in broadly similar contexts and addresses similar questions through them, he makes no attempt to synthesis them into a single account of faith in spite of the obvious connections between them. He refuses to do this for the simple reason that he considers healing faith to be a ‘luxury’ of faith, given to a few by God but not to be expected by all. 3 This paper disagrees and argues that, far from being a ‘luxury’ for a few select Christians, the healing that comes form the Holy Spirit is to be hoped for by all believers for, according to Scripture, it is a foretaste of the Holy Spirit’s great re-creation of the cosmos and all humanity within it that will occur at the final return of Jesus Christ.

ON HEALING FAITH While Barth divides his treatment of the Biblical witness to faith into two parts - saving faith and healing faith - he approaches each in the same way. Whether dealing with the faith that saves, or the faith that heals, Barth is clear that faith involves human knowledge of Jesus Christ, achieved only as the gift of the Holy Spirit, with knowledge defined as knowledge-in-relationship with the whole person of Jesus Christ and not just an acquaintance of a collection of historical sayings. Yet in spite of these connections, Barth makes no effort to combine the two discussions of faith: in these to portraits, in spite of similarities of context and content, he is in fact dealing with two different types of faith. Saving faith, he argues, is that faith common to all Christians: ‘on this normal view faith is to put our whole trust in God for both time and eternity’.4 Healing faith, which he identifies as the faith of ‘those who had a part in the miracles of

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! This paper was originally presented at the 2012 Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of Theology: The Holy Spirit, 26-29 March 2012, University of York, England. 2 ! Barth’s treatment of healing faith can be found in CD IV/2, §64.3 ‘The Royal Man’, pp. 209-47. 3 ! CD IV/2, p. 245. 4 ! CD IV/2, p. 245. 1


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Luxury of Faith: Karl Barth and the Spirit's Gift of Healing by Ridley Hall - Issuu